Toronto Film Festival calls for immediate release of jailed Sudan filmmaker Hajooj Kuka

TIFF artistic director Cameroon Bailey on Saturday demanded the immediate release of jailed Sudan filmmaker Hajooj Kuka. Kuka was recently sentenced to serve two months behind bars for “threatening peace” and “breaching public safety.”

“Hajooj Kuka is an exceptional filmmaker. His last two films, Beats of the Antonov and Akasha, played at our Festival. He was recently invited to join @TheAcademy. Now he’s been jailed in Sudan. We need to make some noise about this,” Cameroon Bailey tweeted.

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“We call our arguments “culture wars” but here are artists imprisoned and threatened for their work and their words,” he added.

Kuka’s documentary Beats of the Antonov, made in the backdrop of the war in Sudan, had won the 2014 best documentary audience award at the Toronto festival. His feature documentary Akasha screened at TIFF in 2018.

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Earlier the producer of Akasha, Steve Markowitz had called for international attention to Kuka’s jailing. On August 13, Kuka raised an urgent alert on Twitter after he and fellow artists were attacked by religious militants. They were attending a theatre workshop at the time of the arrest.

“I am an academy member. We got attacked during a theatre workshop in Khartoum by Islamists instigators. The police stood by the attackers and arrested us. Now we are awaiting trial. Is there any support for artists or do we need to get killed first,” he said in a tweet.

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Kuka who co-founded the Sudanese artist collective called The Refugee Club has also featured in the Foreign Policy magazine’s list of Leading Global Thinkers of 2014 in the Chroniclers category.