We are delighted to present a retrospective of Hussein Shariffe (1934-2005), a pioneering avant-garde Sudanese painter, poet, and filmmaker.

This special event is a homecoming of sorts. Hussein Shariffe had deep roots in the UK. In the late 1950s, he studied Modern History at the University of Cambridge, and in 1959, he completed a Master’s degree at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied under Lucian Freud. He had his first painting exhibition in 1957 at Gallery One. The National Portrait Gallery holds photographs of Shariffe from this period, sitting in front of his paintings.

Upon his return to Khartoum in 1970, Shariffe became known primarily as an experimental filmmaker. He travelled back and forth between Khartoum and London, having gained a place at the National Film School in the UK, when he began producing Dislocation of Amber (1975), and Tigers Are Better Looking (1979). He spent the latter years of his life in Egyptian exile after the military coup of Sudan in 1989, where he continued to make films until his death in 2005. To honour Shariffe’s pioneering artistic legacy, the Sudan Independent Film Festival, which Shasha has collaborated with on several occasions, is held annually on the anniversary of Shariffe’s passing.

Programme 

The Dislocation of Amber (1975) dir. Hussein Shariffe

Filmed in the city of Suakin, the film observes a place now reduced to ruins, a shadow of its former self. Shariffe uses scorpions, seashells and camel caravans to accentuate a sense of desertion. He interweaves visual imagery, symbolism, abstraction and the melodic voice of the late Sudanese singer Abdel-Aziz Dawoud.

Tigers Are Better Looking (1979) dir. Hussein Shariffe

Adapting Jean Rhys, Hussein Shariffe turns literary interiority into a condensed meditation on exile, estrangement, and unequal modernities. The film stages a passage between Sudan and Britain as a disorienting encounter with race, class, and cultural hierarchy. Through poetic abstraction and measured contrast, Shariffe renders displacement as a lived structure of feeling, at once intimate and geopolitical. Tigers Are Better Looking remains a key articulation of diasporic consciousness in the history of Sudanese moving image.