‘AL-SIT’, a film collaboration by Qatari filmmaker Maysaa Almumin and Sudanese filmmaker Suzannah Mirghani won the Grand Prix award at the Tampere International Film Festival in Finland. This automatically qualifies the short film to enter the competition category for short films at the Academy Awards.
Almumin is a faculty member of Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar), while Mirghani is the Assistant Director for Publications at the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar.
Award-winning short film
AL-SIT had its world premiere at Clermont-Ferrand – renowned as one of the biggest film festivals for short films – where it won the Canal+ award. Closer to home, AL-SIT was also a recipient of the Doha Film Institute (DFI) Production Grant. The posters for the film were designed by VCUarts Qatar faculty member Hadeer Omar and alumna Rana Jubara.
AL-SIT is set in Sudan and is about women portrayed as both powerless and powerful. The film explores both ends of the social chain and how these roles might be changing in a rapidly changing modern world.
The film called for subtle mirroring of the two main characters – Al-Sit, the matriarch who spins the cotton and Nafisa, her granddaughter who picks the cotton, explains Almumin. The two have a very close relationship yet compete on opposing ends of independence and choice.
Almumin, who was also involved in designing the set, said that to put emphasis on this relationship in the production design, they used saturated colours and textures for the wardrobe, spaces and props of all supporting characters. Nafisa and Al-Sit were presented in cotton white.
Award-winning filmmaker
AL-SIT’s Grand Prix award has been one more reason to celebrate for Almumin. The architect-turned-professor was also in the news recently for another film she directed and produced. Her film ‘… And I Was Left Behind’ was chosen to participate in Qumra, under DFI.
… And I Was Left Behind is a short documentary essay film that Almumin made in a DFI lab under the mentorship of Cambodian documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh.
It’s a film in which I relate to stories of travel and saudade as told to me by my grandmother when I was a child. I make sense of them as an adult through a process of reenactment.
She said that the film was conceived and completed during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Though this film was made during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not a film about it; rather, I would say that the pandemic brought to my foreground a reality that many people experience across the world – that of separation from family due to travel, whether by choice or imposed or restricted.
My grandmother experienced it in her time, and for myself, unable to reach family in different parts of the world, I experience it now.
Almumin noted how making a film in the midst of social distancing measures presented challenges, and in turn, contributed to adopting a lean approach to the film.
She said that the film needed to be made with minimum equipment and processes, and with one assistant and no crew. She took up the task of making small fragments of a set to present the environment where this memory takes place – her grandmother’s room where she made dresses as a seamstress.
Her colleagues from VCUarts Qatar also assisted, faculty member Abir Zakzok supplied some props, and technical coordinator Abdul Cader was kind enough to lend her a sewing machine from his personal antique collection. The beautiful sound that the machine made also contributed to the sound design of the film.
In addition to the honours earned by AL-SIT and … And I Was Left Behind, another film by Almumin – Bint Werdan (J’ai le Cafard) – was an official selection at the Tampere International Film Festival.
The selection is significant given that the film festival received over 6,330 film submissions for its international section in the latest cycle, and ‘J’ai le Cafard’ was one of the 54 short films selected to screen in the festival.
The film was also a recipient of the Faculty Exploratory Research Grant from VCUarts Qatar, in addition to a production grant from DFI and from the Arab Fund for Art and Culture.
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