Documentaries often become something very different than what their filmmakers intended as they are overtaken by unforeseen events. Weiner, Capturing the Friedmans, and Dear Zachary are all fine examples of such narrative twists. The collective documentarians behind Khartoum also experienced such a situation, and have proven fleet-footed enough to turn intended projects disrupted by the catastrophe of a civil war into an innovative message of resilience and healing.
In 2022 Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad, and Timeea Mohamed Ahmed were separately filming five residents of the Sudanese capital, focusing on how their lives had changed after the 2019 revolution ended the 30-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir. During the filming, the filmmakers and their subjects were forced to flee – along with 10 million other Sudanese – to East Africa after a further coup in 2021 had turned much of the country into a battleground between warring military factions.
Far from halting production, the four filmmakers joined up with British documentarian Phil Cox and brought the five participants together to participate in each other’s stories. The result is something approaching group therapy; harrowing and hopeful in equal measure. We meet civil servant Majdi, resistance council volunteer Jawad, tea stall owner Khadmallah, and irrepressible young bottle collectors Lokain and Wilson.
The filmmakers switch between footage recorded pre-exile and the use of green screen to recreate their experiences, the backdrops progressively filled in as the stories progress. It’s an impressionistic approach that makes for evocative viewing, even as it makes it less viscerally challenging than footage taken of the events themselves. The style is somewhere between the animated war memoir of Waltz with Bashir and the reenactment as mens rea for the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings in The Act of Killing.
The approach works beautifully, and the artifice allows for some incredibly moving moments that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Wilson and Lokain ask for their drawings of the atrocities to be added to the backdrop and they tell their story in front of a tableau resembling a kindergarten Guernica. And in one instance, Jawad breaks down and Ahmed breaks directorial distance to run on camera and console him.
Yet for all the visual methods the filmmakers use, there is nothing so powerful as the moments the smiles drop from the faces of the two boys as they recount the moment the RSF airplanes swooped in. These two boys who were shunned by many in Khartoum (‘People would call us names, as if we come from a strange place. But we held hands and didn’t care’), who desired nothing more than to own some of the nice shirts they coveted at a particular stall. It’s a particularly bitter irony that these street kids now have their shirts as they attend school as part of the forced diaspora in Nairobi, but all they want is to get back home.
Khartoum is a skilfully crafted documentary that doesn’t feel exploitative, and perhaps with the techniques used, could even be a therapeutic experience for its participants. It is also a sober reminder of the knife edge on which Syria finds itself right now with the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. The parallels between the two situations are striking. On is own specific terms however, Khartoum is an ingenious and vital document of a war that threatens to be forgotten amid the conflicts that hold more Western attention.
Screening as part of Sundance Film Festival 2025
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