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Film: Beats of the Antonov
Director: Hajooj Kuka
68 minutes
How on earth do you make a positive film about one of the most devastating events in African history: the tearing of a nation in two?
Before seeing Beats of the Antonov, just knowing it was set in Sudan during the civil war, my stomach performed its inevitable lurch in anticipation of something gruesome, hopeless and, ultimately, futile.
Even some of the most informative documentaries on post-colonial Africa – including my favourite, Raoul Peck’s Lumumba – tend to leave us with wet cheeks and that self-indulgent question: What can I do to make this better?
But I was quite wrong about where Beats of the Antonov would take me. Besides the predictable but very necessary history lesson at the beginning, everything else moved further and further away from my expectations. And that’s what makes this film so special and why there is no denying that it deserved the people’s choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it debuted in 2014.
Yes, the story is about war, the division of a nation along ethnic lines, and with it the destruction of cultures, families and human spirits – but the focus on music takes it to a different level.
The film focuses on the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountain communities, which have been most directly ravaged by the iron fist of President Omar al-Bashir, whose quest for a purely Arab state leaves the other 156 cultural African groups unaccounted for.
Bashir calls these people “black sacks” and vows to wipe them out. We learn how, despite their ability to fight back with weapons, these communities have retreated into their ancient songs and traditions to heal the wounds left by the daily sieges of the Antonov planes, which drop bombs and destroy their homes. Sudanese director Hajooj Kuka spent two years living with these communities. Because of this dedication and his own exposure to danger – which, unlike more ego-driven film makers, is not really highlighted in the film – he has created a view of the situation that feels as natural, or rather unnatural, as being there yourself.
Despite its vicious political plot, Beats of the Antonov is a story of triumph. The very thing that the dominant regime wishes to stamp out – black African identity – is what saves these people from complete desolation. By gathering to make music in local languages, and pass on these cultural practices to a new generation, they sing their identity into being: a defeat of the Bashir project.
By choosing a range of characters to speak on the issue in different ways, Kuka presents different perspectives on the conflict, and tells a truly nuanced story. He moves the viewer seamlessly through the philosophical, the political and the personal. From civil society dissenters, who speak out against Bashir’s psychological form of ethnic cleansing, and a local ethnomusicologist who discovers herself through her work with the community, to the multi-ethnic rebel fighters and, ultimately, to a mother who asks the most basic question: How will the murder of black African children make Sudan any better for anyone?
There is an unbreakable thread of song and humanity, which allows the film to be both brutally honest and hugely productive in terms of shifting our understanding of the conflict in Sudan. Considering the way in which Western organisations and media have painted themselves as saviours of a savage region, this film is a keen antidote, putting the story of Sudan back into the hands of the Sudanese.
