‘I don’t think about the future too much. I’m always thinking about the past.’
Born in Khartoum, Sudan, the artist Salah Elmur creates vivid paintings rooted in Sudanese life, politics and his childhood memories. In this short documentary, the Italian director Matteo Lonardi captures Elmur in Cairo, Egypt, where he’s now based, unable to return to his beloved home country due to its ongoing civil war. For Elmur, photography’s ability to hold time still makes it almost magical. Driven by his fascination, he sources antique Sudanese studio portraits and mugshots online and from shops, and carefully tends to his personal archive of family photographs. These images often reappear on his canvases, transformed by his surrealist touch. Photography also binds him to his father, a photographer whose discarded prints – marked by technical flaws such as double exposures – once captured Elmur’s imagination and continue to echo through his art. By exploring Elmur’s ties to an unreachable homeland, the film surveys his vast inner landscape of longing and nostalgia, where the past both lingers and is ceaselessly reinvented.
