(Failing to Make) A Documentary About My Sudanese Family (2026)
There is a particular kind of documentary I have a real soft spot for: the one that sets out with a clear mission, only to discover, in the making, that the film has quietly become about something else entirely. Sid Elbadawi's (Failing to Make) A Documentary About My Sudanese Family is exactly that, a personal, raw and often affecting little piece about diaspora, belonging and the awkward, tender business of reconnecting with family. It is good rather than great, but there is a real honesty here that stayed with me. Three stars.
The premise is right there in the title. Elbadawi sets out to document a trip with his family, shot against the shadow of Sudan's civil war, and finds the very act of making the film beginning to undo it. The mission he starts with slips out of his grasp, and what replaces it is something looser, more searching and more personal. It reminded me a great deal of Uncivilized, another documentary where the process of filming reshapes the objective until the finished piece takes on a whole new life of its own.
What I liked most was its texture. It was refreshing to sit with the home-video footage, to get to know Elbadawi and his family on their own terms, and to feel the film thinking aloud about its own faltering purpose. It is well written and well narrated, and there is a disarming candour to the way it admits its own failures, the "failing" of the title is not false modesty but the actual subject. As a study of what it means to belong to a place you are separated from, and to a family a war has scattered, it has moments of genuine feeling.
If it stops short of being more than good, it is because the very looseness that gives it its honesty also keeps it from building to much. The film drifts where a firmer hand might have shaped, and its rawness, while appealing, occasionally reads as unfinished rather than deliberately open-ended. I admired it more than I was moved by it.
Three stars. (Failing to Make) A Documentary About My Sudanese Family is a warm, personal and quietly thoughtful piece about identity and reconnection, and a promising calling card from a film-maker with a real voice. It is good, and worth your time, but not quite more than that.
Reviewed at the BFI London Film Festival, where the film screens.
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