Roopa Gogineni, 2018

Over the past seven years, Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir has dropped thousands of bombs on villages across the Nuba Mountains. Ganja, the 26-year-old pacifist son of a rebel commander, witnessed a bomb drop meters from his home. He has never found a way to fight back until he became the man who controls Bashir’s head. Ganja and his friends in the Nuba Mountains acquired a puppet of the dictator and filmed a satirical web series called “Bisha TV.” Through Ganja’s work—and the comic escapades of two Sudanese strongmen puppets—we see an unlikely flowering of political humor and appreciate the true power of grassroots media. Screening with Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405.

14 minutes