Talking About Trees (2019)
★★★ — Talking About Trees (2019)
There's a moment in Talking About Trees where four elderly Sudanese filmmakers sit in the dark of a derelict open-air cinema, the projector flickering, the audience nonexistent, and yet they're completely, genuinely alive. That image alone is worth the price of admission. It captures everything this documentary is quietly trying to say: that the love of film doesn't die just because a regime tells it to.
The four men at the centre of this are veterans of Sudanese cinema, old classmates and lifelong cinephiles who were once banned by Islamist authorities for making films deemed too political, too provocative, too free. Now, decades later, they're attempting something that sounds almost absurdly simple: reopen a public cinema in Khartoum. What unfolds is anything but simple. Bureaucracy, indifference and the slow grind of cultural suppression have left their mark on everything, including the men themselves. But they keep going, and that persistence is what gives the film its warmth.
Their humour is one of the film's great pleasures. These aren't broken men mourning a lost cause. They're sharp, funny and defiant in the most relaxed, unhurried way imaginable. When things go wrong, and things go wrong constantly, they laugh. Not the hollow laugh of defeat, but the laugh of people who've been through worse and are still standing. It's genuinely moving without ever asking you to be moved.
Where the film really grips you is in the glimpses of their old work. Clips from films that were censored, suppressed or simply lost to time surface throughout, and they're extraordinary to witness. You're looking at fragments of a cinematic history that was nearly erased on purpose, stories that embedded social critique into everyday narratives because that was the only way to get them made. It reminded me of how I felt watching Lingui, the Sacred Bonds (2021), that sense of African filmmaking using quiet, grounded storytelling to say things that are anything but quiet. There's a whole world of film history here that most of us have never been given the chance to see, and that alone makes Talking About Trees worth your time.
The film also has something honest to say about ageing and irrelevance. These are men who were once at the forefront of a cultural movement, and now they're navigating a country that has moved on digitally, politically and socially without them. There's a bittersweet quality to watching them try to thread a projector or negotiate with officials who barely seem to register what cinema even means anymore. It never tips into self-pity, which is to the director's credit.
But I'll be straight with you: the pacing is a problem. This is an observational documentary in the truest sense, and while that approach has its rewards, it also means the film can feel like it's drifting at times. There's no strong narrative spine pulling you from one scene to the next. You're just watching, and occasionally waiting. For a film about people fighting to keep storytelling alive, it could do with a sharper story of its own.
Still, three stars feels right. It's not a film that grabs you by the collar, but it earns its place. It sheds light on a cinematic culture that's been systematically buried, it celebrates people who refused to let that burial be permanent, and it does so with genuine affection and no false triumphalism. The projector might not always start. The audience might be just four friends in fold-out chairs. But the dream is real, and this film makes you feel it.
Three stars.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2025-09-08
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