Goodbye Julia
Mohamed Kordofani’s Cannes award-winning debut is a subtly told story of two women’s lives getting intertwined by the unrest in Sudan.
The story of GOODBYE JULIA is largely set in 2005, at the end of the Sudanese Civil War, before the country’s division between the Muslim north and predominantly Christian south. The darker-skinned southern Sudanese are heavily discriminated against by the Muslim northerners in the capital city of Khartoum. Public burnings regularly take place in the streets. Distracted by one such burning, Muslim Mona hits a dark-skinned boy with her car. After the collision, she flees, pursued by the boy’s father. Once home, the latter is shot dead by Mona's husband, who thinks his wife is being threatened by a southerner. Mona conceals both the murder and its motive. Consumed by guilt, she seeks contact with the little boy’s mother, Julia, who is desperate to find her missing husband. Mona offers Julia a job as a housekeeper and takes her and her infant son into her home. In this complicated situation, can the truth remain hidden?
GOODBYE JULIA was the first film from Sudan to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Director Kordofani convincingly shows how the effects of racism and religious hatred permeate the daily lives of well-meaning ordinary people. (jc)