Khartoum
(Sudan/United Kingdom/Germany/Qatar, 78 min.)
Dir. Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, Phil Cox
Programme: World Cinema Documentary Competition (World Premiere)
In 2022, with Khartoum, Sudan as their base, filmmakers Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad, and Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, along with creative director and writer Phil Cox,originally set out to film five residents in a time of political unrest. They took interest in the stories of Majdi, a civil servant; Khadmallah, a tea lady; Jawad, a resistance committee volunteer; and Lokain and Wilson, two young bottle collectors. Each of the Sudanese directors paired up with an individual participant while the two boys were treated as a team. The makers aimed to chronicle daily life in a time when a military leadership had brought down the previous civilian government. But when war subsequently broke out between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, an estimated ten million people, including those involved in this filming, were forced to flee to East Africa.
In response, the filmmakers wisely changed their approach.The resulting film, Khartoum, more vividly captures the realities inherent in the situation. The film now effectively reveals the various levels of the subjects’ experiences. From the safety of their new locale, the directors employed green screens as a primary strategy to help the participants re-enact their tales. What’s ingenious here is how they highlight this backdrop as an artistic decision by employing an overriding self-reflexive element. While the film maintains its focus on its original subjects, the camera regularly pans out to capture the director and crew interacting with them. Similarly, as each person tells his or her story, the director will sometimes interject, stepping into the shot to offer solace and comfort during particularly difficult emotional moments.
Revelling in its originality, Khartoum becomes a uniquely poignant hybrid documentary about a war-torn nation and its people. In this hypnotic blend of styles and strategies, the directors have successfully blurred the lines between form and content to fashion a richer, more comprehensive view of war’s destructive effects. Leaning heavily on the film’s meta core, their re-enactment-based approach expertly weaves together all manner of typical documentary elements from portraiture to verité, using that to intersect with an inspired mesh of animated and fantastical components. The very act of making this film becomes an unforgettable feat of trauma-transformed resilience.
The film stands as a stirring testimony to individuals—in this case, filmmakers and subjects alike, who lean into a difficult situation in order to adapt and push beyond often unbeatable odds. Not only have these directors illuminated the fundamental realities of the Sudanese refugees’ lived experiences, but they have realized a wealth of possibilities within the film’s very structure. This effort expands the documentary’s impact and reach.
Not only do we watch as the subjects re-enact details and memories from their lives back home and build a picture with their words, but the filmmakers literally realize those stories. Jawad stands in front of the screen and describes his apartment back home – with each object appearing as he names it – but we see and hear the director and crew responding to him. When Jawad needs actual people to populate the space, the other participants join in, and he tells them their roles and he directs their actions. The same happens with the other participants as they relive their previous realities in front of the screen. As the film progresses, the act of filmmaking becomes a collaborative one.
This approach also reinforces the idea of a safe space for each of them. When Khamallah does the same but breaks down from the weight of the memories, the director penetrates the fourth wall to comfort her. Gone are the days when the filmmaker sits dispassionately behind the camera while the subject suffers onscreen. In fact, the filmmaking process her acts, however temporarily, as a balm, for the young boys especially, who regularly vocalize their displeasure with the adults, blaming them all for war. More touching then are their shared green screen memories where these children declare that all grownups are stupid. Eventually, the boys and their director create a sequence which enables the two to escape into their own sanctified imaginary place, where they are kings and adults are nowhere to be found.
Due to real-life circumstances, the directors of Khartoum made creative decisions that resulted in a completely different strategy for their documentary, and refreshingly, a more complete picture of life before, during, and after the latest coup in Sudan. Using the original footage shot on the ground, the directors pivoted to create a blend: the film becomes a mix of reality based impressionistic points of view together with subjective and imaginative visions. Such a strategy creates an intense interplay that allows for a deeper plunge into these experiences. As this process unfolds, hopes, dreams, memories, and even fantasies are equally as important as chronicled evidence. The mix of styles and strategies in this film provide a deeper sense of these subjects as individuals, and the film conjures a different, more profound, level of fact-based reality.