Critics reviews

The film's triumph isn't just conceptual, but visual... You Will Die At Twenty makes the leap from the small and provincial to the resonantly universal.

Sudanese film-maker Amjad Abu Alala’s radiant drama dares to wonder if death could inspire courage rather than fear.

The film avoids hyperbole in its thoughtful, philosophical exploration of young life saddled with a finite expiry date, pondering whether it should be an excuse for exuberance and gorging on life experience, or perhaps sitting tight and trying your best to ward off the incoming curse.

The film is a parable about the dangers of blind faith in religion and authority, but it’s also warmly compassionate and accepting of human nature.

Abu Alala’s ardent attention to daily details, rooted in political and cultural history, offers a powerful symbolic vision of the tormented and violent legacy of dogmatism and dictatorship.

A vibrant and transfixing revelation, “You Will Die at 20” is as novel a vision as we may see this year.

Ultimately, the film has less interest in confronting the spiritual contexts it situates itself within, since, as an ending tag denotes — a remembrance of the victims of the Sudanese Revolution — this is all allegorical. What You Will Die at Twenty seems to have on its mind, then, is a portrait of the volatility of youth within the context of said revolution.

Avoiding didactic conclusions or pat answers, Alala’s film questions blind belief but finds boundless enchantment in every frame.

Using the tone of its title as another subversive device, You Will Die at Twenty mires the viewer in a crippling feeling of certainty that was always just an albatross of someone else’s making.

In many ways, this becomes a film about potential, both that of its young protagonist and of the director - in Abu Alala's case it isn't fully realised here but there's a good chance it will be in whatever he tackles next.

[T]he Dubai-born Sudanese writer/director sharpens this fable-like coming-of-death tale into a moving commentary on unwavering compliance; a clear portrait of Sudan during its 30 years of authoritarian leadership.

Some may find a clash between its fable-like guilelessness and other moments when the outside world’s cynicism breaks in, yet the film remains a touching, nonjudgmental depiction of people circumscribed by superstition.