You Will Die at Twenty

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

Its quiet profundity strikes you hours, days after viewing.

[A] gentle, affecting Sudanese drama...

Amjad Abu Alala's stunningly photographed drama challenges strict dogmatic practices and posits how a life without a moral code can cause much damage.

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. From its meaningful ideas on the here and the hereafter, its lesson for Muzamil is that after perishing a rebirth may follow.

Spins an intelligent and affecting yarn in complex hues.

A potent parable for life in this (Northern Sudan) war torn and timelessly backward corner of the world.

Abu Alala's ideas are quite elementary, explored at a surface-level and never wielded into something complex or thought-provoking.

The journey toward present allegorical conceits, shaped into strung-along plotting that drags ... is only minimally evocative in grasping the [film's] substantial weight.