Hussein Shariffe
Directing
Biography
Hussein Shariffe (حسين شريف) (7 July 1934 – 21 January 2005, Omdurman, Sudan) was a Sudanese filmmaker, painter, poet and university lecturer at the University of Khartoum. After years of schooling in Khartoum and in Alexandria, Egypt, he studied modern history and fine arts in England, where he had his first exhibition in London's Gallery One in 1957. Back in Sudan in the 1970s, he worked both at the Ministry of Culture and at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Khartoum. In 1973 he began a second artistic career as filmmaker, producing several documentary films and cinematographic essays on subjects such as traditional rites or history in Sudan, as well as on life in exile during his later years in Cairo.
Known For
Tigers are Better Looking is an adaptation of a short story by Jean Rhys. In the film, Shariffe directs his view towards exile in Europe, showing the wide disparity between North and South. The film contrasts two different civilisations, the homeland, Sudan, and the country of exile, Great Britain. Through poetic abstractions the director manages to portray the strong sense of exile and the longing for the homeland.
Tigers Are Better Looking
DIARY IN EXILE is a documentary film that uses a combination of sound, image, colour and peoples testimonies to historically account for the period following the fundamentalist military coup in the Sudan in 1989. This period witnessed the migration of a staggering number of Sudanese from their country to all parts of the World. The Sudan became an expellant of its people. The greater majority of Sudanese migrants headed to Egypt, where the film was shot, there is an estimated number of 3 million Sudanese migrants to Egypt since the military coup. Moving between different strata of Sudanese communities in Egypt the film, through various personal testimonies, throws light on the living conditions of ordinary people. All provide pieces of the saga, all have taken refuge in Egypt. All dream of returning back to Sudan, one day. The film was premiered at the United Nations Human Rights Conference, Vienna, in 1993.
Diary in Exile
Not the Waters of the Moon is an educational documentary developed for UNICEF. The film is to encourage vaccination of children in rural areas. The title of the film was carefully selected by the Director, to explain simply to the villagers that it is not a difficult task to perform vaccination.
Not the Waters of the Moon
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, cultural damage and rich trade. Shariffe used the poetry of the great Sufi masters Ibn al-Farid, and Sheikh Abd al-Rahim al-Burai (Burai of Sudan) 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.
The Dislocation of Amber
Hussain Shariff's first film, a documentary centred on a traditional fertility rite of the Ingessana people in the southern Blue Nile State, celebrating ashes, the sun and good harvests.