TCO London Huck 71A

You Will Die at Twenty

Review by David Jenkins @daveyjenkins

Directed by

Amjad Abu Alala

Starring

Islam Mubarak Mahmoud Maysara Elsaraj Mustafa Shehata

Anticipation.

A sadly all-too-rare chance to catch a new work from Sudan on the big screen.

Enjoyment.

Spirited and philosophical, if perhaps a little too laconic at times.

In Retrospect.

Its quiet profundity strikes you hours, days after viewing.

First-time director Amjad Abu Alala’s meditative drama concerns an existential prophecy in a Sudanese village.

Without meaning to sound glib, Amjad Abu Alala’s emotionally tortuous feature debut plays like a classic movie about teen angst, in which a brooding youngster becomes obsessed with the prospect of his untimely demise.

Its story doesn’t play out in some grey Western suburbia, rather a far-flung Sudanese village wrought from glowing sandstone in which our brooding hero Muzamil (Mustafa Shehata) must carry the existential weight of a death sentence handed down to him while just a babe.

The doomsday clock applied to this boy’s life is the result of a whirling dervish who topples over at a traditional ceremony and then counts to 20 – onlookers assume the meaning to be that Mumazil will die at the moment he reaches that age.

The film avoids hyperbole in its thoughtful, philosophical exploration of young life saddled with a finite expiry date, pondering whether it should be an excuse for exuberance and gorging on life experience, or perhaps sitting tight and trying your best to ward off the incoming curse.

At times it’s a little too ponderous, and sometimes struggles to bring variation and surprise to its runtime. Yet this laconic, meditative drama muses on the nature of time and the revelation that, even though Muzamil’s predicament seems highly unlikely to the rational onlooker, the knowledge he accrues is pertinent to all mortals.