Resistance as Poetry

Written By Sil Azevedo

"Bullets don't kill. What kills is silence."

This is a beautiful, poetic film, featuring young activists in Sudan who were not afraid to risk their lives to oppose a cruel dictatorship. Filmed over four years in Khartoum by French filmmaker Hind Meddeb, this film captures the inspiring art and political fluency of these young Sudanese. Poetry, music, wall art come together with civil protest to weave a touching tapestry of social conscience and resolve.

Meddeb herself was raised in Paris with deep African roots and fluent in Arabic -- her father was a Tunisian writer and her mom a Moroccan-Algerian linguist. She understands the heart of these young protestors and captures their spirit in a most sensible way.

What a treat this is. If you are confused about all that is going on in Sudan, you are not alone. It is a complicated, dramatic and tense situation. Sudan, Remember Us will not answer all your questions, but will immerse you in the lives and art of some wonderful humans, and help you appreciate their struggle and heart.

To be honest, we could use some of their clarity and courage as we face our troubled times.

Sil Azevedo

I was seven years old when I got my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 133. It was Christmas of 1973. Since then, I have always seen the world through the lens. It is my way of making sense, of visually dealing with paradoxes and complexities of life. In high school I was the lab rat and spent each free minute at the feet of the Beseler enlarger, hypnotized by its magical light. Still today I enjoy low light ambiences. They say photographers do it in the dark. I am living proof - ha! Architecture school followed as photography was not a career option in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The combination of art, composition, light, form and space, coupled with the demands of physics found in Architecture have their parallel in photography. The concepts are transferable. As I started my career in Architecture, I soon found that I was more excited about the concept and the print than the actual building. Fantasy is my reality. I kept shooting, learning and apprenticing with some incredible artists. In time, as life took its turns, my original passion for photography became my full time profession. It has been almost 20 years since I walked into the pro shop and charged the Hasselblad and the studio lights to my credit card. As he saw the bill and my naive optimism, even the salesman exclaimed, "you're going to have to sell a lot of pictures..." I did and still do, but what drives me is not that. It is the unstoppable desire to understand and to relate. To me, that is photography.

http://silazevedo.com
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