Alsarah: The Sonic Historian

Alsarah: The Sonic Historian is part of In The Making, a documentary shorts series from American Masters and Firelight Media follows emerging cultural icons on their journeys to becoming masters of their artistic disciplines.

---

Director Statement from Roopa Gogineni and Wael Gzoly

We followed Alsarah up the stairs of a shopping mall in Kampala. On the top floor, a hundred or so recently displaced Sudanese gathered for a concert. It had been over a year since the war began in Sudan and everyone in the room was in the midst of mourning and crisis management, evacuating family members and coordinating humanitarian relief from a distance. Then the music began. For several hours the audience danced and sang, their collective grief and exhaustion transformed into joyful abandon.

Alsarah did not perform that night, but she was working. The concert was the culmination of a ten-day musical residency she led for displaced Sudanese musicians. The residents, who came from different regions of Sudan, learned one another’s traditional rhythms and lyrics in each other’s native languages. Cultures long pushed to the margins in Sudan were placed at the center. It was a deliberate act, to hold up the very diversity the war was exploiting and trying to destroy.

Many months later, we followed Alsarah on tour for the launch of Seasons of the Road, the third album of her band, Alsarah & the Nubatones. Far from Kampala, audiences in rural Massachusetts and Manhattan were similarly transported into another world, a borderless one in which each song carried histories of resistance and migration.

We are filmmakers, and we are also products of the same transnationalism that shapes Alsarah’s music. It’s what drew us both to her work over a decade ago. Wael’s family is from Nubia. Like Alsarah’s family, they were among those displaced when dozens of villages flooded during the construction of the Aswan Dam. Wael heard in Alsarah’s music a Nubian voice embodying a lost homeland, carried to stages and airwaves around the world. Roopa, who had worked as a journalist in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, first encountered Alsarah in the documentary Beats of the Antonov (2014) directed by hajooj kuka. In the film, Alsarah records music from the Blue Nile and Nuba Mountains, where, under aerial bombardment, the local rhythms and improvised compositions of girls chronicled the war and became tools of resistance.

Over the years, we’ve both worked with Alsarah on various projects. Wael served as the cinematographer for several of her music videos. Roopa works alongside Alsarah through Sunduq Al Sudan, a mutual aid collective channeling emergency support to communities in Sudan. With this film, we were excited to collaborate again, to share Alsarah’s story and her genre-defying work that has inspired us and countless others.

More about Alsarah

Alsarah is a singer, songwriter, bandleader and somewhat reluctant ethnomusicologist. Born in Khartoum, Sudan, she relocated to Yemen with her family before abruptly moving to the USA, finally feeling most at home in Brooklyn, NY where she has been residing since 2004. She is a self-proclaimed practitioner of East-African Retro-Pop music. Working on various projects, she has toured both nationally and internationally. With her main outfit, Alsarah & the Nubatones, she has released 2 full-length albums titled Silt, followed by Manara (Wonderwheel Recordings, 2014 and 2016). She has also released 1 full-length album with French electronic producer Débruit titled Aljawal (Soundways Recordings, 2013). And she was featured on the Nile Project‘s debut CD, Aswan (named in the top 5 must hear international albums by NPR, 2014). Always trying to connect the musical dots with both her full length albums, the Nubatones saw themselves re-imagined and remixed by various acclaimed electronic producers in 2015’s Silt Remixed and 2017’s Manara Remixed (both via Wonderwheel Recordings). In between albums Alsarah also works with the Sudanese artist collective Refugee Club Productions on a variety of projects including the critically acclaimed documentary “Beats of the Antonov.”