The Art of Sin

Synopsis

Ahmed Umar is a successful young artist, living and working in Norway for the past 10 years since arriving from Sudan as a political refugee. Struggling with his sexuality, Ahmed was forced to leave his home country, which although having abolished the death penalty for same-sex conduct in 2020, still retains a sentence of up to seven years in prison. In 2015 Ahmed became a target from members of the Sudanese community online after coming out on Facebook, and soon discovers that Norway isn’t without dangers for openly gay immigrants either. Despite his success, Ahmed longs to return to Sudan to reconnect with his roots, and in 2018, film director Ibrahim Mursal accompanies Ahmed back home to discover if the country and the family that he left behind will now accept him. On this journey to reaffirm his Sudanese identity in a country whose laws declare him a sinner, Ahmed invites us along for an intimate portrait of an evolving artist, spanning worlds and cultures, art and religion, national and gender identities.

Credits

IBRAHIM MURSAL

Director

For Sudanese - Somalian - Norwegian director Ibrahim Mursal, this film is more than four years of asking and thinking through cross cultural questions. 

"I was going through a mini identity crisis. I was born in Norway to Somali parents; my religious family left for Sudan in the late 90's. There I received top class religious education and graduated as an oil engineer before pursuing my true passion: filmmaking. 

In 2013,  I decided to come back to Norway. In Norway, my years of conservative upbringing met one of the most liberal and secular societies in existence. Being away from the common religious dogma I hid behind in Sudan; I found myself having to answer some hard questions. One of the them: What do I think of homosexuality? This was the start of this story and the film "The Art of Sin".