Anxiety and existential doubt dominate the mind of an isolated young man as he tries to emerge from seclusion, projecting these inner conflicts onto his Sudanese passport.

Jamal follows the life of a camel, most of which plays out in a dreary, small room — a sesame mill. Bound and blindfolded, the camel is condemned to turn in endless circles inside the mill, its sense of time distorted. Shaddad creates a powerful meditation on labor, exploitation, and economic progress and uses the camel’s plight as a metaphor for the struggles of workers enduring harsh conditions and treatment. With its haunting sound design and minimalist approach, Jamal stands as one of Shaddad’s most affecting works, exploring themes of exploitation that run throughout his filmography.

Dead As A Dodo lays bare the settler colonial mythology at the heart of the popular narrative of the Dodo’s extinction. By drawing on archival material and the Dodo’s apparition, the film performs a sensory haunting, reviving the spaces between life and death that have been shaped by settler violence into a value-forming exercise. This work is inspired by and is in conversation with a book of poems titled A Theory of Birds by the Palestinian-American poet Zaina Alsous.

When Jafar is detached from his soul in a surreal journey through a forest, he must mentally escape the brutal truths of the conflict in his homeland Sudan and the horrors of war and displacement, before it destroys his mind. Playful images about harsh reality.

The Dislocation of Amber was filmed in the city of Suakin, a formerly flourishing port in Sudan, now in ruins. Its history is one of famine and opulence, devastation and progress, rich trade and damage, and colonialism. Shariffe used symbols to accentuate a sense of desertion and alienation hinted at in the title. This surreal masterpiece of Sudanese cinema features poems sung by the late Sudanese singer Abdel-Aziz Dawoud.