“Once upon a time in the land of films…” mutters Suleiman Ibrahim as he looks down at the abandoned projection booth floor, where gritty, unspooled yards of celluloid, curled from the Sudanese heat, crunch beneath his feet. The 35mm projectors, so dirty that it takes a leaf-blower to clean out the dust, are unusable. “My dear, a young lover has replaced you,” he continues. “Digital technology is the young lover.”

After going almost a year without a projected image, this viewer doesn’t need a reminder of the importance of movies as something more than just pixelated feed-through to television. But I thank the Gods of Cinema for Talking About Trees, first-time director Suhaib Gasmelbari’s profoundly fervent documentary on the subject. Moviegoing as we know it perished years ago in Sudan — as a result of Islamist censorship, not natural causes. Since 1989, cinematic divergences have been placed on the endangered species list, with film production scotched, the National Film Institute shuttered, and movie theatres abandoned. But that’s not enough to stop semi-retired filmmakers Ibrahim Shaddad, Suleiman Ibrahim, Eltayeb Mahdi, and Manar Al Hilo, collectively known as the Sudanese Film Group (SFG), from trying to resurrect the dead.

Their goal is to restore cinema to its former glory by dusting off an outdoor amphitheater — appropriately named The Revolution Cinema — and making it ready to once again bring artistic enlightenment to the masses. To anyone who has ever projected film, or sat in the audience and silently cursed out a projectionist’s glaucomatous job performance, or fallen in love in the dark hard enough to rush home and call everyone in the phone book to boast of their latest cinematic affair, and to those for whom going to the movies is as vital as the next breath they draw, who can’t wait for this damned pandemic to end so that we may resume our bi-weekly pilgrimages to the multiplex, Talking About Trees is good for what ails you. The exigency of the discussion cannot be overemphasized, and the end result is unlike anything I’ve seen.
(2019) — Scott Marks