Short film
Tigers Are Better Looking
Hussein Shariffe · 1979
Synopsis
Adapted from a short story by Jean Rhys, the film follows the exile in Europe of a man from Sudan and sets two civilisations side by side, his native country and Great Britain. Without a continuous narrative, through poetic abstractions, it conveys the gap between North and South, the exile's loneliness and his longing for home, to songs by Abdel-Aziz Dawoud.
Context
Having come to cinema to reach a wider public than that of painting, Shariffe trained at the National Film School and made there, after a 1975 essay on the ruined port of Suakin, this film of some twenty minutes, in English, whose framing he described as pictorial. Prints of his films are kept in Berlin; restored and subtitled, they have been shown notably at BAM in New York in 2025, and his archives are the subject of a project at King's College London.
Who it is for
For those interested in the cinema of exile and the Sudanese avant-garde, in a short poetic essay in English.
Prizes and reception
Long unseen, since its restoration it has featured in retrospectives devoted to Sudanese cinema, such as that of BAM in 2025.
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