Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhaj, Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, and Phil Cox recently premiered Khartoum, their documentary film, at the World Cinema Documentary Competition section of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. A concise documentary, Khartoum is a diary of the psychological, physical, and architectural effects the ongoing war in Sudan between the Sudan military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces(RSF) has on the citizens, especially those from the titular city. But, the directors didn’t set out to make a film about the ongoing conflict that has claimed over 28,000 lives and displaced millions, including the filmmakers and subjects of the documentary. As the directors laid bare for me in a recent Zoom conversation, the original intention was to make a cinematic poem dedicated to Khartoum and its residents.
Cox was, as a video journalist, making a different film in 2021 in Sudan when a coup happened. This war led to his discovery of the Sudan Film Factory which was brimming with a horde of enthusiastic filmmakers with ideas, stories, and energy but with no filmmaking equipment and kits. Spurred by their enthusiasm, Cox reached out to Apple and some cultural institutions. Apple responded with iPhones donations and institutions responded with grants. Now, with available gadgets, funding, and story ideas, the making of Khartoum started. But as Cox will inform me, “the intention was to make a simple story about the lives of Khartoum residents. The first idea was to make a cinematic poem to the city; just a poem to the city.”
Thus when filming started, there weren’t any visible political or overt historical intentions in sight. However, when a full-scale war ensued between the RSF and the Sudan army resulting in the killing and displacement of Sudanese citizens, including the filmmakers and the subjects of their documentary (Lokain[12] and Wilson[11], two friends who picks refuse around Khartoum, Jawad, a Resistance Committee Volunteer, Khadmallah, a Tea Stall Owner and Majdi, a Civil servant), the film adopted another creative and political tone. “As the war started,” Snoopy recounts, “we had to shift the narrative [tone]to capture the new reality. We felt that we had to talk about the people’s realities within the context of the ongoing war even if from the beginning it was about telling the story of Khartoum’s residents.”
Thus, there are relics of the original film deposited into this new film. Those parts are tagged the pre-war phase. In these scenes, we witness the subjects leisurely move around their part of Khartoum.
As a result of the war, the directors fled to Kenya for safety. It was while living in Kenya, with their original film incomplete, that the film’s ideological and creative shift happened. The directors agreed to make a new film as an act of resistance and preservation. This ideological and creative shift came with an issue: how do they locate the film’s participants who might have been injured, missing, displaced, or worse, killed due to the war? A relentless five-month search for the subjects commenced.
On finding them, the production team paid for their escape from Sudan to Kenya. In Kenya, the documentary production team and their subject bonded, and a new film started taking shape. This time, with no pictures and footage of the violence committed against the subjects, the documentary team made a poignant decision that further shaped the making of the film: the subjects were going to reenact moments from their lives on a green screen.
It was French-Swiss director and screenwriter Jean-Luc Godard that said “cinema generates memories.” What this sentence implies is the ability of cinema to make a memory permanent. And, in the director’s new vision of making a film about the Sudan war, the filmmaker asked their subjects to recreate a troubling and painful memory. Reliant on their memory and fellow subjects who acted as willing characters in their reenacted story, each of the documentary subjects shows us the joyful, dreamy, playful, romantic, and frightful moments of their lives. “What we were doing, was that at the very least, we wanted the film to document the lives of Khartoum’s residents before and during the war,” Cox mentions about the importance of reenacting scenes from the participants’ lives.
When I probe the directors on how they were able to build trust, they start by saying, that as much as their being behind the scenes created a sort of distance from the ongoing ruin and trauma, they are also living victims. As Sudanese themselves, they have witnessed the struggle of safe transportation, shelter safety, electricity blackout, lack of water and food, and profiling at checkpoints while traveling through states in Sudan. As Snoopy tells me, “this gave us a more internal view of how to tell the details of the crisis and guide the participants to share their experiences.” The commonality of their experience provided the foundation for trust and vulnerability. “Also,” he continues, “one of the things we did to build trust and vulnerability with the participants was to do our re-enactment scenes. We did this to encourage them and show that we faced the same or similar stories in the ongoing war and displacement journey.”
How did the directors arrive at the “selection” of the five subjects? Timeea graciously explains that each of the directors individually “selected” their subjects and that there weren’t specific markers that guided the “selection.”Khadmallah is a Tea Stall Owner and Saeed, one of the directors, is a longtime customer of hers. Saeed saw, in Khadmallah, a politically aware and active woman who passionately participated in protests against tyrannical rule. Rawia Alhaj’s relationship with Lokain and Wilson was first established by Anas’s friend who introduced them. After this introduction, Alhaj started visiting them in Khartoum weekly to get their guardians’ consent. Timeea met Jawad and was intrigued because he embodied Khartoum’s contradiction. Jawad is a practicing Sufi, a Rastafarian and many other things that seem to contrast each other. Majid is the archetypal non-vulnerable Sudanese man who isn’t presented as being vulnerable onscreen. As a Sudanese man, it’s almost taboo to show feelings and raise pigeons as a man.
When Cox discusses some of the challenges they had to overcome while making the documentary, he starts by articulating the production circumstances and how it sort of created a utopian Sudanese setting where Sudanese of varying religions, class, and languages peacefully cohabit. For context, in Sudan, as in other African countries forcefully amalgamated by the Western colonizers, there is continuous ethnic tension. Part of the tensions in Sudan, which the documentary briefly spotlights, is the question of whether Sudanese are Africans or Arabs and the fragile conversation around ethnicity and national identity. To create a utopia, the production of the film made these Sudaneses from varying ethnic groups, social classes, and religious backgrounds. As Cox informs me the physical contact of the documentary subject and production team can inspire conflict. But, because the production team prioritized the mental and physical well-being of both filmmakers and subjects, they were able to glide through and bond seamlessly while making the film. “For this film, the team and the subjects developed a relationship and that’s a very powerful statement to make about the ongoing separatist and secessionist movement in Africa as a result of the forced amalgamation of Africa by the British. By production, this film is an antidote to that,” Cox says.
An additional challenge the team experienced when filming Lokain and Wilson was the confrontational questions they received from residents of Khartoum. The residents questioned their right to film the kids and their unpatriotic representation of Sudan. To provide context, Snoopy tells me that in Sudan, street kids like Lokain and Wilson, are “seen as taboo and invincible.” This was the root of the confrontation and, in some situations, full-blown fights between the filmmakers and residents of Khartoum. Rather than make them weary, the conflicts further strengthened their resolve to tell the story of Lokain and Wilson. ”This,” as Snoopy says, “gives a context into what people think and makes us more enthusiastic about telling this story because we wanted to break that taboo of seeing street kids as being shameful.”
The film screened at Sundance to a warm reception and will be screening at the Berlin International Film Festival soon. Curious about the response they have received so far, I quizzed the filmmakers about what the response has been so far. Their response is an informative lesson on the limitation of translation, cultural awareness, and how international audiences’ limited cultural understanding can cause them to lose sight of certain cultural nuances, moments, and jokes tucked into the documentary. “For an international audience, they will miss many cultural nuances, texture, and layers in the film. They will mostly feel drama and emotions. But, if you are Sudanese or East African, you will see and feel these layers,” Cox said of the screening experience so far.”
Timeea expands on this further. “The definition of what’s funny, valuable, important, and emotional varies depending on the audience the film is being screened to. Perception of the film’s nuances is based on awareness, culture, and knowledge of Sudan.”
Cox concludes that “The film has depth. And that depth is for the local audiences to get. At the top, Khartoum will serve the international audience as a story of drama, courage, and positivity. But, for central Africans and Sudanese, it’s a film of memory, taste, smell, and a much-more-alive-cinematic document of the Sudanese people. And that’s what I think is the success of the film.”
How do they define or view success for the film? Cox says “We all knew, while making the film, that unmindful of what happened, success or failure, we wanted the film to serve as a document and testimony about the war. What we were doing, was that at the very least, the film would be a document of the value of a city before the war and diaries of people who lived there before and after the war.
Seyi Lasisi is a Nigerian film critic with an obsessive interest in documenting Nigerian and African cinema.
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