Goodbye Julia – Muslim International Film Festival

Writer and Director: Mohamed Kordofani

The Muslim International Film Festival continues with another movie that competed in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes in 2023. Opening the Muslim Film Festival was the tense neorealist Hounds from Morocco. Now comes Goodbye Julia, a family drama. of sorts set in Sudan at the time it was split into two; the Muslim Sudan and the Christian South Sudan. Following the friendship between a Muslim wife and her Christian maid, Mohamed Kordofani’s film seems to suggest that the partition was unnecessary and that people from the two religions could learn to live together.

It’s 2006 in Khartoum and Muslim Mona knocks down a young Christian boy in her car. When the father comes out to scoop his son off the road, Mona panics and drives off. The father pursues her on his motorbike. When she gets home, her husband, Akram, shoots him dead believing that he is taking part in the riots that have sprung up following the death of John Garang, the Christian First Vice President who was leading the movement for an independent South Sudan.

The father’s murder is hushed up by the Muslim police, but Mona’s sense of guilt leads her to employ the man’s widow Julia as a live-in maid. Mona never tells Julia anything about the accident or the murder; Julia surmises that her husband has gone off to find a better life in Europe. Nor does Mona tell her own husband that Julia is the wife of the man he killed. The house they all live in becomes a house of lies symbolized by the persistent leak that drips water from the kitchen ceiling.

Akram doesn’t seem to mind too much that Julia and her son now live with them, although the mother and son Daniel sleep in the garage without air-conditioning. He considers the Christian Africans as “slaves”; Julia and Daniel must use different crockery marked underneath by a red painted spot. When Daniel touches Akram on the arm, the latter takes care to wipe himself down. He justifies his belief by saying that the Koran teaches that slaves are permissible; that not everyone should be treated as an equal.

But slowly Mona and Julia become friends despite Mona’s deception and their relationship forms the heart of Kordofani’s film. However, the politics dividing the city are always there to see whether it’s the bullying that Daniel receives at school or the rallies that Julia observes as she finishes her degree at a Catholic university. As Mona can’t have children, another fact that she conceals from her husband, Daniel becomes a kind of surrogate son, even for Akram who teaches woodwork to the boy.

Goodbye Julia is a confident debut feature by Kordofani, who was once an aviation engineer. His shots in the house are intimate with closeups of watermelons or omelettes while the city is bathed in a warm glow, almost with a Hollywood sheen. He obtains superior performances from both his leads. Sudanese singer Eiman Yousif plays Mona, who learns from Julia how to follow her own ambitions that were stunted when she married Akram. As Julia, fashion model Siran Riak, in her first film, has less of a narrative arc. It’s clear that Kordofani believes it is the Northern Sudanese who need to change their views.

Before she married, Mona was a jazz singer, and her two songs in the film are an awkward fit for such an examination of how the political becomes the personal. The songs, though lovely, come across as a little formulaic, a shortcut to the emotions that would have best been avoided.

Showing a country divided by religion and a marriage divided by gender expectations, Kordofani’s film has been a hit at the festival circuit. It’s an important film and deserves a wider release.

Goodbye Julia is screening at the Muslim International Film Festival from 31 May – 1 June.