You Will Die at Twenty

This exceptional coming-of-age story is the eighth fiction feature film to be made in Sudan. Sudanese director Amjad Abu Alala, who grew up in Dubai, draws inspiration not only from Sudanese writer and activist Hammour Ziada, but also from the five years he himself spent as a teenager in Sudan.

This fable about the straitjacket of tradition and the call of freedom, wherein lurks a metaphor for Sudan today, unfolds in a powerful, sure-footedly composed and classic-looking style with a poetic sensitivity. In a small village, young Muzamil has to live with the prediction that he will die when he turns twenty. His father has fled the impending grief. His mother, already in mourning, hides him away from the outside world. He tries to find a place to belong in the Quran school, the advances of a girl and the filmed images an old cameraman who has returned to the village shows him. Dedicated to the victims of the Sudanese Revolution.