Suzannah Mirghani’s Debut Film 'Cotton Queen’ is a Powerful Reflection on Sudan’s Colonial Past and Future

A group of girls is picking cotton in Sudan. One starts clapping a quick rhythm; the others smile and follow, turning towards each other, forming a circle. “The fire, oh Lord, the cause of the fire oh Lord,” she sings, and her friends chime in. “My dad said don’t sell onions. But I’ll sell onions because my man loves them.”

The girls giggle, then return to the chorus until the next girl sings a funny verse about a fat, rich husband or selling oil to meet a boy. These kinds of songs are called “Aghani Banat,” “girls’ songs.” Their lyrics often express dreams or concerns that women can only share with each other.

Teenage girls manifesting their dream husbands sets the scene of Suzannah Mirghani’s debut feature film Cotton Queen: Nafisa (Mihad Murtada) works with her friends in the cotton fields that are owned by her grandmother, Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud), the matriarch of her family and village. Nafisa has an eye on onion farmer Babiker (Talaat Fareed). But when Bilal (Hassan Kassala), better known as “The Businessman,” comes to their village from abroad, all mothers, including Nafisa’s, are eager to marry their daughters to him. The Businessman is trying to convince the villagers to step into the future by switching from natural to genetically modified cotton seeds, but Al-Sit is determined to protect the purity of the cotton she fought so hard for. Many stories circulate around this old lady, especially when it comes to her killing a British officer.

Cotton is at the center of this film. “Once you have cotton, you have all the dynamics around it,” the Sudanese Russian director tells OkayAfrica. “The colonial history. The intimacy of women and cotton, because cotton is used for periods, and it’s the thread in circumcision. The weaving and making of it, and the fabric. For me, these are all intimately related.”

The story’s throughline, the history of Cotton Queens, came to Mirghani in the footnote of an academic paper. “I was reading about the British colonial project in Sudan and found out about the annual beauty contest that started in the mills in the north of England,” she says. “I thought, ‘That is a film.’ To put beauty as the face of this horrible, violent, colonial industry, and to personify it as this young, innocent girl.”

The film celebrated its world premiere as part of International Critics’ Week at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival. It has since screened in Germany and the US, and won the Golden Alexander at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. But Mirghani’s favorite screening was Cotton Queen’s MENA debut in Qatar this week.

“It was the largest Sudanese audience, so watching it together felt different. They got all the jokes,” she says. “I had to leave at some point, because it was just so overwhelming.” 

Telling stories despite the war

Mirghani was particularly happy because the Doha Film Institute flew in 15 members of the film crew. Many of the actors had been cast for her award-winning short film Al-Sit in 2020 and have since become a community. The original plan was to shoot Cotton Queen in the same house as Al-Sit, but when war broke out in April 2023, everyone fled to Egypt, and Sudan was no longer accessible. 

“I am absolutely heartbroken that we didn’t shoot in Sudan,” she says. “We were waiting, but once July came, we needed to prep, because we were supposed to shoot in October 2023.”

They cut their losses and decided to build a Sudanese set in Egypt, where the cotton fields, the Nile River, and the language resembled the original scenery more than any other place could have. Egypt’s film industry is tightly controlled, and Mirghani had to fight to keep as many Sudanese crew members as possible on set. “The hair, the makeup, the clothing, the art direction, all elements I could see needed to be Sudanese,” she says. 

The crew immersed themselves in Sudan so deeply that whenever they stepped out of the set after a long shooting day, they would realize that they were still in Egypt, still displaced, and take the bus home crying. “It was tough and emotionally exhausting,” says Mirghani.

Framing circumcision outside of a binary

“I’ll never forget what she did to me and the other girls”, says Nafisa’s mother, Aisha (Haram Basheer), about her mother-in-law, Al-Sit, a woman who cares for the girls picking her cotton and wants to protect her granddaughter, but also rules with an iron fist and has done unforgivable things. 

Al-Sit personifies the difficult relationship we have with our elders as we try to understand why they behave the way they do, knowing that they might never give up their secrets. “She is the most complex character. She is the one I know the least, because she still hides from me on the page,” says Mirghani. “She straddles tradition and love and protection; she's both the protagonist and the antagonist.” 

The power of Al-Sit interweaves with a trauma that connects most Sudanese women: circumcision. A polarizing tradition that is mostly demonized in the diaspora and mostly celebrated in the country, where it is upheld by grandmothers. 

“This film is not about circumcision," says Mirghani. “But it does show you that there is something hidden, something that needs to be spoken about. Even [at the audience discussions of the film in Doha] people were asking about circumcision, saying how it affected them.”

Meanwhile, the women in the film crew did not want to be on set on the shooting day of a circumcision scene. “They did not want to relive that trauma, and we worked with a mostly foreign crew on that day,” says Mirghani. “It’s a very difficult topic.” 

On humor and magical realism

Cotton Queen carefully treads the line between violence, grief, humor, and magic. There is a grandmother medicine maker, a fortune teller, an angel, great music, and lots of jokes. Like when Nafisa infuses a dish with her breath and accidentally enchants the wrong guy, or when Al-Sit intentionally mixes her breath with Nafisa’s to confuse another guy. 

“I grew up in Sudan and left at 16, so for me it has always been a place of fairytales and folklore,” says Mirghani. Some of these tales carry dark symbolisms that the audience dwells on until a funny remark, or a battle of which mother cooks the meal that will woo The Businessman, pulls them back into the daily rituals in a Sudanese village. 

The focus on daily life and getting a teenager ready for marriage gives Cotton Queen what Mirghani calls a “false simplicity." “I think a simple story of a village can tell you a lot about the larger political dynamics in Sudan and the world,” she says. “Because these [genetically modified] seeds are coming from somewhere.”

The press has been celebrating Mirghani as the first Sudanese woman to write and direct a full-length film for the silver screen, but she does not claim that title. “It depends on how you phrase it, right?” she says. “I know that there are women that have written or directed for television, which are also feature films.” 

More importantly, Mirghani sees herself as part of a cinematic culture that is still under-researched and under-appreciated. “If you said this is the first Sudanese film to work with a mostly women cast, I would be happier with that.”