The Brooklyn Rail

Goodbye Julia (2023) looks back at southern Sudan’s bumpy road to secession during the 2000s through the intertwined fate of two families that political circumstances would have kept apart. Propelled by its strong female leads, the award-winning film elevates a pivotal moment of Sudan’s recent history into a tale of fragile bonds and necessary emancipation.

Before the 2011 referendum in favor of establishing the Republic of South Sudan, pro-independence protests raged in Khartoum amid a climate of discrimination, racism, and violent retaliation against the mostly dark-skinned, non-Muslim southerners. In this context of heightened ethnic tensions, northerner Mona (Eiman Yousif) accidentally hits and injures a child with her car. She flees, and the child’s father, a southern man who witnessed the scene, immediately follows her on motorbike to seek justice for his family. During the erratic car chase, Mona panic calls her husband Akram (Nazar Goma) to inform him that a dangerous stalker is following her instead of admitting to the accident she caused. Mona eventually parks her car by her home and Akram, armed, waits at the gate. As the southern man dismounts his motorbike, Akram coldly shoots and murders him in front of his distraught wife.

What ensues is Mona’s quest for redemption; she decides to employ the man’s widow, Julia (Siran Riak) as a live-in maid with her wounded child Daniel (Louis Daniel Ding and Stephanos James Peter), concealing Julia’s real identity to her husband while hiding to Julia that she bears responsibility for her husband’s death (played by Paulino Victor Bol). Truth and deceit play a vital role in the unfolding events and respective character development.

The film’s atmosphere is instantly foreboding: a graveyard, a claustrophobic, stuffy house where sunlight—otherwise excessively prevalent in Khartoum—is kept at bay behind thick curtains. The roof leaks and a lit cigarette is left to burn in an ashtray as if it were incense. The color palette is saturated with earthy brown hues. These elements convey a sense of visual heaviness to the opening scene when we discover Mona and Akram’s stiff dialogue, suggesting a strife between the couple that would explain a deep-set malaise. Things don’t quite belong in their place then, a feeling foreshadowing a required healing.

This urgency is embodied in Mona’s overbearing compromises to keep her marriage alive. A former singer, Mona abandoned her trade to become an untalented homemaker when her possessive and conservative husband gave her an ultimatum—him or the band—and she complied. In many ways, the film showcases a struggle between interiority and exteriority, for example, in the way that Mona keeps with social norms while pursuing her truer desires or when Mona metaphorically stands on her balcony behind bars. The film aptly discloses reinforcing layers of patriarchal violence, revealed under the lens of infertility and control. The northern couple struggles to conceive, and the absence of a child crystallizes a failure and a silence, perhaps a parable for their doomed marriage. Mona can’t bring herself to confess the irreversibility of her diagnosis. Divorce, it turns out, is worse than daily misery. Truth is uncomfortable, explaining how she chooses to navigate her relationship with her maid.

Goodbye Julia tackles political and intimate oppression, as well as betrayal. Violence in the streets of Khartoum against southerners almost runs parallel to the more insidious oppression and submission that Mona experiences at home, where she must wear a mask to please her husband’s expectations. This societal violence is balanced by writer and director Mohamed Kordofani’s empathetic take weaved into Mona’s narrative arc. She fights infertility and oppression with the only antidote possible: love. In embracing Julia and her child Daniel into her home and heart, Mona reconnects with a lost part of herself.

As a young, hardworking, and resourceful mother, Julia possesses attributes that Mona lacks—her son adores her and her abruptly-ended marriage seems to have been happy. For Julia, irrespective of material conditions, home points to harmony, not dissonance. Julia even allows herself to fall in love again later in the film. But rather than espousing jealousy, it’s as if Mona indulges in living a freer life through Julia, an avatar for the woman she could have been, at least once Mona overcomes her own racist prejudices. Their unlikely sorority acts as a mirror of Sudanese society in exposing race and class-based hierarchies but also as a catalyst to Mona’s own path towards liberation and self-affirmation. One scene hails to this evolution. Mona initially marks Julia’s tableware with nail polish to distinguish them from her own. She finally erases those marks of othering as their friendship deepens, realizing her wrongdoing.

Yet the film’s other protagonist is no doubt Sudan, which more than a static décor acts as a canvas that historically and culturally shapes the story. Kordofani sheds light on the personal vantage point of the separation at Khartoum level, rather than the liberation struggle taking place in the south with its famed heroes. He questions the inevitability of the two women’s parting. Shot on location just before the outbreak of the latest brutal conflict of the opposing Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces and displacing millions of civilians, the film represents a time capsule that bleeds into the present and, thus, serves as a cautionary tale. Sudan’s many fault lines need reckoning and mending, mirroring the journey Mona undertakes in acknowledging the difficult past, accepting consequences as a form of rehabilitation and forgiveness.

In that sense, one could assign Goodbye Julia to the range of trauma-driven stories, as many POC narratives tend to. This is wrong in my view. During the New York City film screening, attended by many Sudanese people, I saw cathartic tears around me from the joy of seeing a beloved city and more. Reducing Mona or Julia to the status of victimhood negates their individual, complex characters—and those of Sudanese people. For instance, Mona is a force demonstrating that other paths are sinuous but possible, that individual agency exists and must be exercised with courage for things to turn around. This landscape of possibilities honors the significant role played by Sudanese women during the 2018–19 popular revolution which toppled the longstanding dictatorial rule of Omar al-Bashir. During that window of hope, many Monas bloomed, and they resisted going back to the old days and a lesser version of themselves. As such, the film amplifies the potency of voice and defiance.

While not shortlisted for the Oscars, Mohamed Kordofani’s first feature film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Freedom Prize, is now gaining an increasing viewership in the Arab region and beyond. Kordofani, a self-taught filmmaker who left an aviation career behind several years ago, offered first-time roles for lead actors Eiman Yousif, Siran Riak, and a key role for Ger Duany (who plays Majier, Julia’s charismatic love interest). All of them stand out through their precise and sensitive performances, which in some cases echoed their own life experiences. Yet for all its power-shaking social taboos, it is unfortunate that the film insufficiently subverted stereotypes attached to Black caregivers, for instance. Despite this minor note, I left the screening reenergized by the promise of a young Sudanese creative scene which also flourished in the wake of the revolution. While immediate concerns are now understandably placed on survival, safety, and mutual aid, there is certainly no goodbye to Sudanese filmmaking and the many stories it remains to share.