You Will Die at Twenty

Drama, Coming of Age, African Diaspora 102 min
Streaming Online: Starting Fri, Feb 12
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“Please don’t let the title You Will Die at Twenty deter you from seeing this gorgeous, phantasmagoric fable of a film, which won the Best First Film award at the Venice Film Festival this year. This is the first film submitted from the Sudan (just removed from the terrorist list by President Biden) to the Oscars. Inspired by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, young and talented director Amjad Abu Alala tells the story of a village boy who is approaching twenty. At his naming ceremony when he was an infant, a Sheikh predicts that he will die at that age. Captivating, unexpected, and dreamlike, You Will Die at Twenty is like nothing you have ever seen before.” –Laurence Kardish, FilmColumbia co-artistic director and former senior film curator at MoMA

“Critic’s Pick! The visual assurance of You Will Die at Twenty is the most immediately notable element of Sudanese director Amjad Abu Alala’s accomplished feature debut. Beautifully composed and boasting the kind of sensitivity to light sources and color tonalities usually ascribed to top photographers, the film lovingly depicts the remote east-central region of Sudan as a quasi-magical place of sand, sky and the colors of the Nile.” — Jay Weissberg, Variety
“A vibrant and transfixing revelation, You Will Die at Twenty is as novel a vision as we may see this year.” — Carlos Aguilar, Los Angeles Times
directed by
Amjad Abu Alala
with
Mustafa Shehata, Moatasem Rashed, Islam Mubarak, Mahmoud Alsarraj, Bonna Khalid
language
Arabic (with English subtitles)
country
Sudan