Suzannah Mirghani makes her feature debut under conditions that would have stopped most directors: the original Sudanese shoot was cancelled after war broke out in 2023, forcing a full relocation to Egypt. That she delivered something this coherent and this strange under those circumstances tells you something about the tenacity behind Cotton Queen — and something about why the film has an electric, slightly off-kilter energy throughout. The story anchors itself in Al-Sit, a village elder played by Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud with the kind of performance that makes you understand why entire films get built around a face. She supposedly ran the British out of town as a girl — possibly by slaughtering all of them, a detail the village children recount with gleeful relish, and which the film is canny enough to neither confirm nor dispel. The question of what Al-Sit actually did, and what it cost her, is the engine that drives everything else. The colonial critique enters through the back door: a Sudanese-heritage businessman named Nadir arrives to sell genetically modified cotton seeds manufactured by a multinational. History doesn't repeat, exactly, but it rhymes hard. International capital circling local agricultural resources, dressed in the language of development — Mirghani doesn't belabor the parallel, but she doesn't let you miss it either. At the center is fifteen-year-old Nafisa, a poetry-writing granddaughter caught between two arranged husbands she doesn't want and a boy who grows onions and asks nothing of her. The film is smart enough not to resolve this as a simple love-triangle liberation narrative. What Nafisa is fighting for isn't a particular husband — it's the right to narrate her own future, the same thing Al-Sit claimed for herself decades earlier. The generational echo is the film's structural spine. Not everything lands. The tonal shifts — from grounded village realism to shivers of magic, from political parable to intimate coming-of-age — don't always hold their tension. Some sequences feel like they belong to a slightly different film. But these are friction points in a work that is genuinely trying something, not a sign of a director playing it safe. Mirghani is making a film with things to say and the formal nerve to say them slant.
