Mohamed Kordofani, Writer-Director of Sudanese Oscar Entry ‘Goodbye Julia,’ on Racism, Teargas and Thinking Big

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor When writer-director Mohamed Kordofani first conceived of the film “Goodbye Julia,” he realized that he didn’t have a single friend from South Sudan — “and there are millions who live in Khartoum.” Now he has hundreds, he tells Variety. The first Sudanese film to premiere in the Un Certain Regard sidebar in Cannes, his debut feature won the Prix de la Liberté and is now the official Sudanese entry for the Academy Awards, with Lupita Nyong’o on board as an executive producer. The film had its Middle East and North Africa premiere this week at El Gouna Film Festival, where Kordofani was awarded the Variety MENA Region Talent Award.

Originally trained as an aircraft engineer, Kordofani had an epiphany while working in the Gulf which proved to be the genesis for the film: “My wife was pregnant with my second daughter and we needed a maid. The agency presented us with a photo album of a lot of girls from the Philippines. The girls had numbers, years of experience, and age.

There was not even a name, and we just had to choose. It took me back to when I first saw the result of the 2011 referendum, when 99% of the southerners chose secession. I was shocked.

It didn’t take me a long time to know that it’s not a political disagreement. This has something to do with our behavior. They are feeling like second-class citizens in their own country.

And I remember I felt very complicit in what happened.” From this came the story of Julia (Siran Riak), the southern Sudanese maid who works for Mona (Eiman Yousif), an Arabic woman in Khartoum who is hiding a secret from Julia. “I wrote a small synopsis but I was scared to talk about such a sensitive topic, because it will get a lot of backlash. Then something happened.

The revolution started in Sudan in 2018. And suddenly, the people marched on the streets, they want to change and they are talking about the same thing: coexistence, all the things that I wrote on that small piece of paper. And suddenly, I’m not afraid anymore.” The progress of several drafts mirrored the evolution of Kordofani’s own thinking.