On May 13, 2023, the singer, poet, and activist Shaden Gardood was killed by a sniper while sitting on the roof of her family’s home in El Obeid. She had spent the previous day posting online about the war and calling for peace. Nine days after her death, Asia Abdelmajid – Sudan’s first professional theatre actress – was killed by random gunfire in Bahri. A report published in late 2024 by the African Center for Justice and Peace Studies and the Sudanese Music Research Center, titled Tears of Guitars and Screams of Museums, documented more than fifty-five artists, musicians, and performers killed since the war began: some by sniper fire and shelling, some through denial of healthcare when hospitals stopped functioning, at least one – the percussionist Kamel Hasan – through torture in detention. The National Museum was looted. Sudan’s national theatres were bombed or turned into military barracks.
In January 2026, the first phase of the rehabilitation of Khartoum’s National Theatre in Omdurman was inaugurated, with Sudan’s culture minister calling it a declaration of the return of the city’s cultural spirit. It is a start, and it is also a reminder of how much has to be rebuilt from the ground up: not just a building, but the schools that trained the people who once filled it, the industry that employed them, and the audience that came to watch.
What Sudan already trained itself to do
Sudan’s National Theatre company was founded in 1959, three years after independence, with direct government backing. A decade later, in 1969, an Institute of Music and Drama was established and folded into what became the Khartoum Polytechnic Institute – the forerunner of Sudan University of Science and Technology, whose campuses the Rapid Support Forces would go on to destroy in the current war, along with an estimated $220 million in laboratories. Formal drama education fed a generation of playwrights, actors, and directors trained in both Sudanese oral tradition and Western dramatic technique. The 1960s and 1970s were, by every account, a golden period: theatre groups performing to packed houses along the Nile, and a parallel cinema industry – the Sudanese Cinema Company had a presence in nearly every city by 1940 – that peaked in the 1970s and 1980s with Sudanese films winning recognition abroad.
None of this collapsed overnight, and none of it collapsed for one reason. The State Cinema Authority, formed in 1970, was dissolved by 1990 with no institutional successor. The Islamist government that followed imposed censorship and administrative costs that made commercial exhibition and production unattractive. Decades of civil war ate into the disposable income that had sustained ticket sales. By the mid-2010s, of at least fourteen cinemas that had once operated in greater Khartoum, only one remained open. Theatre held on longer and more stubbornly than cinema – Reuters reported an open-air revival along the Nile as early as 2011, and Khartoum maintained at least three professional theatre companies alongside a larger unofficial scene running through schools and cultural centres, particularly after the 2005 peace deal encouraged a wave of national self-reflection. Then came April 2023.
The point of recounting this in detail is not nostalgia. It is that Sudan is not being asked to build a creative industry from a standing start. It already built one, twice – once under colonial administration and once after independence – and the reason to study how other countries did the same thing is that Sudan has done it before and can identify, specifically, which piece is missing this time: not talent, not appetite, not even raw output, but the institutional scaffolding that turns individual talent into a sustaining industry.
Five countries that built this from a comparable starting point
Egypt is the case most familiar to Sudanese audiences, because Egyptian cinema was what Sudanese audiences went to the cinema for. Between the late 1940s and the 1960s, Cairo became the undisputed capital of Arab cinema – more than fifteen local studios, sixty to seventy films a year at its peak, stars like Omar Sharif and Faten Hamama made across the region rather than at home. The government did not leave this to chance: it passed laws supporting the industry and established the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema in 1957, giving Egypt a dedicated national film school more than a decade before Sudan’s own Institute of Music and Drama existed. The lesson is not that Sudan needs a state monopoly on content – Egyptian cinema’s later decline had plenty to do with exactly that – but that a deliberate, government-backed training institution can turn a country into a regional hub within a generation, and that Sudan sat next door to proof of this for fifty years before building its own smaller version.
India shows what happens when that training investment is sustained rather than treated as a one-off. The Film and Television Institute of India was established in Pune in 1960 under the national Ministry of Information and Broadcasting; the National School of Drama, a separate state-backed conservatory for stage actors, opened the year before. Both still operate as the country’s most prestigious credentialing institutions in their fields, producing the directors, cinematographers, and actors underneath the commercial industry the world knows as Bollywood. The scale that eventually built on top of these schools is difficult to overstate: India’s film, television, and streaming sector generated an estimated $61.2 billion in total economic contribution in 2024 alone, supporting 2.64 million jobs nationwide. That did not happen because India was rich when FTII and NSD were founded in 1959 and 1960 – it happened because two specific training institutions existed for fifty years before the commercial payoff arrived at that scale.
Nigeria is the more encouraging case for a country without the resources for a national conservatory, because Nollywood built itself from the bottom up rather than the top down. Nigeria’s colonial-era Film Unit and its 1979 Nigerian Film Corporation were state institutions that state control and military-era censorship largely neutralised. The industry that actually exists today traces instead to the early 1990s, when filmmakers with no formal training and almost no budget began shooting direct-to-video features on consumer equipment, distributed on cassette and later VCD – a model of production so informal it barely resembled an “industry” in the conventional sense. Government support came later and followed the market rather than leading it: a $200 million loan facility in 2011, further grants in 2013 and 2017 under a programme called Project Act Nollywood aimed specifically at improving production quality, distribution infrastructure, and training capacity, and, as of the current planning cycle, a new production incentive scheme, co-production treaties with Brazil and India, a dedicated Creative Economy Development Fund, and tax rebates of up to 30 percent on local production spend. Nollywood now produces roughly 2,500 films a year, the second-highest output of any national film industry on Earth, captured just over half of Nigerian box office revenue in the first half of 2024, and by the country’s own National Bureau of Statistics figures created more than 200,000 direct jobs in 2023 – up from 40,000 a decade earlier – plus an estimated 700,000 further jobs in distribution, equipment rental, sound, costume, catering, and transport. Government figures cited by Nigeria’s own House of Representatives put the sector’s GDP contribution at 2.3 percent, worth several billion dollars annually. The Nigerian sequence – informal production first, formal institutional support second, once the market had already proven itself – is the most directly applicable model for a country in Sudan’s position: it does not require capital or peace to start, only people willing to shoot on what they have.
Ghana shows how a smaller, poorer country builds the training institution Nigeria initially skipped. The National Film and Television Institute was established by military decree in 1978, with its founding technical assistance provided not by the Ghanaian state alone but by the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation of West Germany – an early and explicit example of a foreign cultural-development partner underwriting a training institution a developing country could not yet fund unassisted. NAFTI took its first cohort in 1979 across directing, television production, cinematography, editing, sound, set design, and animation, later affiliated with the University of Ghana in 1998 and upgraded its diplomas to full degree programmes. It has since trained students from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and beyond – a single well-built institution in one country becoming regional infrastructure for several others.
Rwanda is the case that should matter most to Sudan, because it demonstrates the fastest possible timeline, starting from the worst possible position. A country emerging from genocide, with essentially no prior film industry, no film school, and a fraction of Sudan’s population and historical cultural infrastructure, now has a functioning training pipeline in barely two decades: the Kwetu Film Institute, founded by filmmaker Eric Kabera and accredited by Rwanda’s Ministry of Education, teaches camera work, editing, acting, script writing, sound, lighting, directing, and production, with three-month certificate courses co-run with the government’s Workforce Development Authority. The Rwanda Development Board has a formal memorandum of understanding supporting Kwetu and the associated Rwanda Film Festival – marketed, in a nod to the ambition, as “Hillywood” – and co-finances creative grants with the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, four film projects sharing €360,000 in a single recent round. None of this required Rwanda to be wealthy. It required a single committed founder, a government willing to formalise and accredit what he built rather than compete with it, and roughly fifteen years of continuity.
Ethiopia, finally, shows what organic growth looks like once it has a few years to compound, on a timeline directly comparable to Nigeria’s. Ethiopia’s local digital film industry, working almost entirely in Amharic and following the same low-budget, high-volume model Nollywood pioneered, has expanded to roughly four hundred locally produced films granted screening permission in the past five years and more than five hundred registered production companies in the past eight, according to Addis Ababa’s own Culture and Tourism Bureau. The Blue Nile Film Academy, founded in Addis Ababa in 2009 by working cinematographer Abraham Haile Biru specifically to close the skills gap he saw in his own productions, is a private-sector answer to the same problem NAFTI and Kwetu solved through state and NGO channels. Addis Ababa now has more than thirty cinemas, government and private, screening locally made films daily – built, in significant part, by filmmakers training each other because no dedicated public institution existed yet to do it for them.
South Korea is the outlier worth including precisely because it did not start from scarcity, and shows the ceiling rather than the floor. Seoul protected its domestic film market from 1966 onward with a screen quota guaranteeing Korean films a minimum number of exhibition days – a blunt but effective tool that gave the industry room to mature before full exposure to Hollywood competition, even as the quota was later cut under US trade pressure. On top of that protected base, the government layered a deliberate, decades-long export strategy through the Korea Film Council, the Korea Creative Content Agency, and sister agencies explicitly tasked with treating entertainment as national economic strategy rather than incidental culture. The result: Korean content exports reached $14.08 billion in 2024, the highest figure on record for a second consecutive year, and total Hallyu-driven exports – content plus the tourism and consumer goods it pulls behind it – hit $19 billion, up 16 percent in a single year, with an estimated 225 million people worldwide now identifying as fans of Korean culture, a twenty-four-fold increase in a decade. Netflix alone has committed $2.5 billion to Korean content production over four years. No African or Arab country is starting from Korea’s industrial base, but the sequence – protect the domestic market first, then fund export-oriented content deliberately, for decades, through dedicated agencies – is a model, not a fantasy, and Sudan’s own diaspora and Gulf-adjacent audience gives it a plausible regional market to protect and grow into, the way Egypt once did for the whole Arabic-speaking world.
The money, added up
It is worth being precise about scale here, because “cultural revival” undersells what is actually being discussed. UNESCO’s first complete mapping of Africa’s film and audiovisual sector, published in 2021, found the industry already supports an estimated five million jobs and contributes roughly five billion dollars to the continent’s combined GDP – with the potential, if distribution, piracy, and policy gaps are closed, to reach twenty million jobs and twenty billion dollars. Nollywood alone accounts for a meaningful share of the current figure, at 2.3 percent of Nigerian GDP and over a million jobs directly and indirectly. India’s screen sector alone – a single country’s film, television, and streaming industry – generated $61.2 billion in 2024. South Korea’s content exports, from a population one-fifth the size of Sudan’s, exceeded $14 billion in the same year. None of these countries built these numbers from an industrial base Sudan currently has reason to envy; several of them, Rwanda and Ethiopia especially, built theirs from something closer to what Sudan has now, a base of essentially nothing plus a generation of people who wanted to make things anyway.
A further, less obvious multiplier applies specifically to reconstruction economics: a single production or exhibition operation typically generates three to five times its direct crew size in secondary employment across transport, equipment rental, catering, security, costume, and set construction, work that requires comparatively little capital or specialised training to enter. In an economy where formal industrial employment has been devastated and where large infrastructure projects require capital and stability Sudan does not currently have, a sector whose main input is trained people rather than imported machinery or functioning ports is one of the few growth paths available immediately, war or no war.
What already exists to build on
The raw material is not hypothetical. Mohamed Kordofani’s Goodbye Julia became the first Sudanese film ever selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, winning the Un Certain Regard sidebar’s Freedom Prize in the festival’s seventy-sixth edition – made, tellingly, by a director with no formal film-school training, working in an industry with almost no functioning domestic infrastructure to support him. Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees had already carried Sudanese documentary filmmaking to festivals internationally in 2019. Khartoum (2025) was reshaped mid-production into a documentary about its own crew’s displacement when the war scattered them across borders. This is exactly the pattern Nigeria and Ethiopia went through before formal institutions caught up to informal talent: individual filmmakers producing internationally competitive work with none of the infrastructure that should, in theory, be a precondition for it.
What is missing is not ambition or evidence of talent. It is the specific, buildable things every one of these six countries eventually put in place: a dedicated training institution – whether a revived, foreign-partnered successor to Sudan’s own 1969 Institute of Music and Drama on the Ghana model, or a leaner, founder-led school on Rwanda’s – to replace what the war destroyed at Sudan University of Science and Technology; a completed, reopened National Theatre, building on the first phase already inaugurated in Omdurman, as the physical home for the stage tradition that never actually died even when the state stopped funding it; a formal or informal production-support fund modelled on Nigeria’s Creative Economy Development Fund or Rwanda’s creative grants, sized to what Sudan can actually mobilise rather than what a wealthier country could; and, eventually, once cinemas exist again to protect, a Korean-style policy conversation about giving Sudanese and Sudanese-diaspora content a guaranteed foothold in Sudan’s own market before foreign content floods back in unrestricted. None of this requires the war to end first. Nigeria’s video-film revolution and Ethiopia’s Amharic-language boom both happened without waiting for anyone’s permission or any capital beyond what individual filmmakers could scrape together – which is, in the end, the same argument for starting now rather than later.