20th Arab Film Festival

Saturday, September 26 at 4:30 PM

Q&A with dir. Suzannah Mirghani, moderated by Safia Elhillo

ABOUT THE FILM

Set in a cotton-farming village in Sudan, Cotton Queen follows teenage Nafisa as she stands at the crossroads of tradition, modernity, and survival. Guided by her grandmother, Al-Sit, whose stories and memories of resistance against colonialism still shape the village, Nafisa becomes the focal point of a new struggle when a wealthy entrepreneur arrives from abroad with a proposal to modernize the village’s cotton industry and seeks her hand in marriage. Torn between personal longing and communal duty, Nafisa must navigate the fragile balance between empowerment and expectation. Suzannah Mirghani’s debut feature explores local folklore, magical realism, and searing political critiques

FILMMAKER BIO

Suzannah Mirghani is a filmmaker and writer based in Doha, where she works as an editor at Georgetown University in Qatar. Her acclaimed short film Al-Sit (2020) won the Canal+ Award at Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival in 2021 as well as six Academy Award qualifying prizes at Tampere Film Festival. Al-Sit has screened widely, including on Netflix MENA. Her other works include Virtual Voice (2021) and Kamala Ibrahim Ishag: States of Oneness (2022), commissioned by Serpentine Galleries. Cotton Queen (2025), winner of the ArteKino Award at L’Atelier de la Cinéfondation at Cannes Film Festival in 2022, marks her feature directorial debut. 

MODERATOR BIO

Sudanese by way of Washington D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of Girls That Never Die, The January Children, Home Is Not a Country, and Bright Red Fruit, and co-editor of the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and Stanford University, and her awards include a California Book Award, the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and an Arab American Book Award. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is a co-poetry editor at Callaloo and teaches in the low-residency MFA programs at Antioch and Pacific Universities. Her newest collection, Psychogeography, is forthcoming in 2027.

PRESENTED BY MIZNA

Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For more than 25 years, Mizna has been creating a decolonized cultural space to reflect the expansiveness of our community and to foster exchange, examine ideas, and engage audiences in meaningful art.