Since April 2023, ethnic and gender violence against the country’s civilian population has seen thousands killed, over seven million people internally displaced, and a further two million seeking refuge in neighbouring nations. Cultural destruction compounds the humanitarian crisis. Looting and burning of libraries, museums and private collections are commonplace, decimating cultural heritage and erasing resources for post-conflict civil society and community futures.

The Archiving the Exile project is one of many offering cultural and community responses to the Sudanese catastrophe. Shortly before the outbreak of war, the last in a series of boxes, previously stored in family homes in Cairo and Khartoum, arrived on the London doorstep of the psychotherapist and writer, Eiman Hussein. They contained texts and belongings offering a window into the life and work of their former owner, Eiman’s father – Hussein Shariffe – whose documents and films Eiman first began collecting after his death in 2005.

Hussein Shariffe was a pioneering artist, experimental filmmaker, and public intellectual born in 1934 in Omdurman, Sudan. After attending school in Khartoum and Alexandria, Egypt, he moved to England to study modern history at the University of Cambridge before undertaking a Master’s degree in painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1959, where he studied under Lucian Freud.

In 1960, Shariffe returned to Sudan, pursued a teaching career in the Faculty of Art, School of Fine Arts, Khartoum, and founded the arts periodical Twenty One. By the 1970s, Shariffe had turned his attention to film, enthused by cinema’s potential to reach larger audiences. He gained a place at the National Film School in the UK and began producing films of his own, including Dislocation of Amber (1975), and Tigers Are Better Looking (1979). He spent the latter years of his life in Egyptian exile after the military coup of Sudan in 1989, where he continued to make films until his death in 2005.

Digitising Shariffe’s Archive

Shariffe is known today for his evocative artistic explorations of exile experience, as well as his determined advocacy for the causes of anti-colonialism and democracy. “But,” Professor Carter explains, “there is a more immediate reason to return to Shariffe now. We are in the midst of a ferocious war that has not only seen humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale, but the destruction of precious cultural heritage—including potentially the nation’s radio and television archive, which has been occupied by the RSF militia, with the fate of its 13,000 films currently unknown. In that context, the imperative to salvage audiovisual heritage, including Shariffe’s archive, and bring this to Sudanese and global audiences becomes ever more urgent.”

Existing copies of Hussein Shariffe’s films are in safe keeping in Berlin. The transfer of his papers across international borders was the beginning of a further extended collaboration between Eiman Hussein, now a King’s Visiting Research Associate; Professor Erica Carter in the Department of Film Studies; and cultural partners including the Sudan Film Factory, Cimatheque Alternative Film Centre (Cairo), and the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art (Berlin).

In 2022, the King’s research team transported Shariffe’s document archive to King’s College. On site, team members catalogued, digitally copied, and archived the corpus of texts and objects. The first outcome of the project will be an open source resource, with the aim to make Shariffe’s archive globally available via an online dual-language Arabic-English catalogue.

Screening Shariffe’s Films

A second project outcome relates to the project team’s conception of film archives as resources for potential futures that come to new life through creative reuse. Workshops and screenings since 2019 at venues including the British Film Institute London, the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, the Arsenal Berlin, and the SAFAR Festival of Arab Cinema, have already attracted festival and diasporic audiences keen to reconnect with Sudan’s rich independent cinema tradition. Future plans include a series of creative workshops co-organised with cultural partners in Egypt and the MENA region, and engaging displaced filmmakers seeking to build new futures from the material and virtual remnants of Shariffe’s exile archive.

The Sudan Memory website 

A core King’s College London-based partner in Activating the Exile Archive is the Sudan Memory website. This British Council and Aliph Foundation-funded initiative includes a website designed and built by colleagues in King’s Department of Digital Humanities, in partnership with the Sudanese Association for Archiving Knowledge (SUDAAK). Sudan Memory colleagues have supported Activating the Exile Archive with advice and training in digital archiving.

Collaborations also remain ongoing via Sudan Memory with Sudanese partners including Nile Valley University, who have continued despite the continuing military conflict to collect and digitise documentary heritage as a resource for cultural belonging and shared Sudanese futures.

"For the Sudan, this process also means so much and there is an urgency and necessity for it given what we are facing due to the catastrophe of the war. Creating this open source can become a transferable model that other Sudanese artists/filmmakers can use/replicate to archive and preserve their works. Particularly as we are witnessing the erasure of our memories.”

Activating the Exile Archive gratefully acknowledges the support of the Sudan Film Factory (SFF) and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) and funding from the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King's.

Header Images: 

1. Filming The Dislocation of Amber, Suakin, Sudan, ca. 1983
2. Production still from the set of, Of Dust and Rubies: Letters from Abroad
3. Shariffe on the set of Of Dust and Rubies: Letters from Abroad
4. Shariffe directing Of Dust and Rubies: Letters from Abroad