Gadalla Gubara

Gadalla Gubara (1921–2008) was a Sudanese cameraman, film producer, director and photographer. Over five decades, he produced more than 50 documentaries and three feature films. He was a pioneer of African cinema, having been co-founder of both the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers FEPACI and the FESPACO Film festival (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso).[1] His daughter, Sara Gubara, who is a graduate of the Cinema Institute in Cairo, Egypt, assisted him with his later film projects, after he had lost his eyesight. She is considered to be Sudan's first female film director.

Gadalla Gubara
Born1921
Died2008
OccupationCameraman,film producer, director, photographer

Life and work

Gadalla Gubara's "oeuvre spans feature films, reports, educational documentaries, advertising films and home movies. He documented Sudan’s political and social developments for over 50 years, from independence in 1956 via the phase of socialist government and its policy of modernization all the way through to the proclamation of the Islamic laws in 1983, equally capturing the obvious deterioration in conditions for filmmaking that went hand in hand with this development."[2]

According to Studio Gad Archive, he grew up in a very modest family, and as a young man, Gadalla worked as a waiter. During his shifts, he loved to observe the clients, imagining them as actors in a theatre play and learning lessons for his life from them.[3] Having been educated at the prestigious Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum, Gubara was first exposed to filmmaking during WWII, when he served in El Fasher, North Darfur, and on the North African front as an officer in the British Army Signal Corps. He received training as a cameraman at Studio Masr in Cairo, and when he returned to Sudan, the British Film Unit commissioned him to make educational films about agricultural production. "Cinema in local languages was regarded as the best way to reach the mostly illiterate population. Gubara made his way across Sudan with a cinema van, screening documentaries for rural populations, along with more light-hearted films."[4]

In 1955, Gubara produced Africa's first colour film, Song of Khartoum, a contribution to the avant-garde city symphony genre. The years following independence in 1956[5], were marked by an atmosphere of political and cultural awakening. Gubara bedame the main filmmaker for the newly established Sudan Film Unit under the Ministry of Culture and Information. During this period, he documented everything with his camera: Government meetings with president Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassi on state visit, the nightlife of Khartoum, the construction of railway lines, factories and dams. At the end of the 1950s, he received a grant to continue his film studies at the University of Southern California, and was appointed Director of the Sudan Film Unit upon his return in 1962.[6]

Wanting to produce his own documentaries and, most of all, feature films, he left the Sudan Film Unit and set up Sudan's first private film studio, Studio Gad, in 1974.[7] His first feature film Tajouj is a dramatic story about the unhappy love of two suitors towards the heroine, set in rural Eastern Sudan, and featured the famous actor Salah ibn Albadya.[8] Tajouj won the Nefertiti Statute (Egypt's highest film award) at the Cairo Film Festival in 1982, and won prizes at film festivals in Alexandria, Ouagadougou, Tehran, Addis Ababa, Berlin, Moscow, Cannes and Carthage.[9]

Gubara was still working at the age of eighty-eight. He lost his sight at the age of 80, when his studio had been confiscated by the government, but still continued his last film projects, with his daughter Sara Gubara assisting him.[10] In 2006, he received the Award for Excellence for his career at the Africa Movie Academy Awards.[11] Highlighting perhaps his most prolific era, the Sudanese author Omar Zaki wrote: "Gubara's films from the 1960s and 70s capture what many refer to as "the Golden era of Sudan" when "Khartoum was the Beirut ... or ... the Paris of Africa". At the time, Khartoum was a multicultural city with dozens of Catholic, Protestant, Coptic, and Ethiopian churches, and a variety of ethnic communities - Jewish, Armenian, Syrian, Greek, Lebanese, and Serbian. This rings true with Gubara's memories of the capital: "Khartoum was an open city; it had all kinds of amusements, it had nightclubs. People can play freely, can dance...But when the sharia started with Nimeiry, Khartoum became just like an Islamic town."[9]

Between 2014 and 2016, a large part of Gubara's films were digitised by the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art [1] in Berlin, Germany,[12] and thus have been shown again to audiences in Sudan as well as abroad.[13]

Filmography (feature films)
  • Tajouj (1977)
  • Barakat Al-Sheikh (1998)
  • Les misérables, adaptation of the novel by Victor Hugo (2006)[14]

References
  1. "Arsenal: the film holdings of gadalla gubara (2013, 2016)". Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  2. Quoted from web page “The Film Holdings of Gadalla Gubara” - project by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin, Germany
  3. "Biography – Studio Gad Archive" (in German). Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  4. Bidoun. "The Omega Man: Gadalla Gubara and the half-life of Sudanese cinema". Bidoun. Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  5. "Gubara and fellow scriptwriter Kamal Ibrahim, were the only cameramen to record Sudan's Independence on January 1st 1956. He captured the symbolic moments when democratically elected Prime Minister Ismail Al-Azhari walked from the parliament to the presidential palace and replaced the British and Egyptian flags with the blue, gold, and green flag of Sudan."
  6. "Arsenal: the film holdings of gadalla gubara (2013, 2016)". Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V. Retrieved 2019-11-23.
  7. Life in film: preserving the legacy of Sudanese film-maker Jadallah Jubara, The Guardian, 26 July 2016.
  8. Tajouj, retrieved 2019-11-22
  9. Zaki, Omar (2012-09-16). "Sudan: Gadalla Gubara - a Forgotten Filmmaking Legend". allAfrica.com. Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  10. Ellerson, Beti (2010-12-07). "AFRICAN WOMEN IN CINEMA BLOG: Sara Gubara: Her Father's Eyes". AFRICAN WOMEN IN CINEMA BLOG. Retrieved 2019-11-21.
  11. Frederique Cifuentes, dir., Cinema in Sudan: Conversations with Gadalla Gubara.
  12. "Studio Gad Archive – The heritage of the Sudanese filmmaker Gadalla Gubara" (in German). Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  13. AFP (2016-07-26). "Life in film: preserving the legacy of Sudanese film-maker Jadallah Jubara". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2019-11-20.
  14. Les misérables, retrieved 2019-11-20
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