Filming what survives
Made just as Sudan descended into war, 'Khartoum' captures the beauty, pain, and humanity of a city shaken by violence—and the filmmakers who became refugees alongside their subjects.
Still from Khartoum (2025). All images courtesy of Native Voice Films.
- Interview by
- Feven Merid
When the directors of the documentary film Khartoum set out to craft its story, they could never have been prepared for one of the deadliest wars of our times breaking out. In April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia and the Sudanese Armed Forces began warring with each other. Throughout Sudan, life would never be the same. Since the start of the fighting, some eight million people have been displaced internally, and four million fled the country. Tens of thousands have been killed. Food insecurity and famine triggered by the war have left half of Sudan’s population—almost 25 million—facing extreme hunger. From the onset, Khartoum, its sister city Omdurman, and the surrounding areas became battlegrounds for intense fighting. More than two years later the intensity has only spread. In October, El Fasher, a key city in the Darfur region, fell to the RSF militia giving them control of the area. It is a clash that might be a civil war on its face, but it has international stakes. The United Arab Emirates’ support for the RSF militia continues, while arms from China, Russia, Serbia, Türkiye, and others have been identified.
To illustrate this complex moment in Sudan, directors Ibrahim Snoopy, Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, and Timeea Ahmed turned to the inner workings of life in Khartoum. They found five civilians: Khadmallah, a tea vendor; Lokain and Wilson, two young boys who collect plastic bottles for money; Majdi, a civil servant Majdi and Jawad, a Sufi Rastafarian resistance organizer, to show the city’s inner workings. Each coming from different backgrounds, they represent the mix of classes and ethnicities that come together in Khartoum. Partially shot before the devastation of the 2023 war, the film unintentionally became a time capsule. When fighting became untenable, both directors and subjects made the decision to leave, finding refuge in Nairobi. At some points, the film takes a step back and turns the camera on itself, showing the directors and each of their subjects pausing filming to console one another on set, the background graphics at once displaying Khartoum streets cut back to their natural state, a green screen.
In the end, despite weathering some of the greatest challenges a film production could face, the four directors and their creative director, Phil Cox, along with the production team, completed Khartoum. Released this year, the film has been making its rounds through screenings around the world. Last week, I spoke to Snoopy and Cox about making a film during war, director-subject relationships, and their hopes for the film. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
It started as a joint production between Native Voice Films, a UK-based production company, and Sudan Film Factory, a Sudanese-based production company, and Ayin network [a Sudanese news outlet].
I was in Khartoum in 2021, I was making another film called The Spider Man of Sudan. So we got some seed funding, and I wrote an outline of a workshop that was making a poem of the city, kind of cinematic poem of Khartoum. We did a call out and selected filmmakers, we started the workshop, and the filming was like a nonnarrative poem of the city at a kind of pivotal moment. Civilian society was still on the street, there was a coup happening, and it was like, what can we do that kind of brings another depth to this?
This film starts with footage shot before the war started in 2023. Can you talk about how the fighting impacted production?
We started filming in the last quarter of 2022 until the beginning of 2023. And we all decided that it would happen at the end of April because it was Ramadan and everyone was fasting, and, you know, it’s a little bit difficult to film under the scorching sun. And so we were aiming to shoot at the end of April, but then war broke out on April 15, and that ruined the whole plan. We had to regroup again after a few months in Nairobi.
We were trying to figure out whether Nairobi is the best place to regroup again. Nairobi is perfect, you know, the weather is fine. There were also talks about how to get out; the directors got out of Sudan first. And then we had a couple of workshops on what to do at this point, whether to finish the film or not. How are we going to continue making the film? We all agreed that it’s necessary to finish the film right now. Also, it has a bigger purpose now to highlight what’s happening in Sudan, because there wasn’t a lot of media coverage of what the film observed. We got the participants, one by one. Some of them were easy to get to Nairobi; they already had passports. Some of them took a few weeks or months to get them here, you know, with the paperwork and the whole chaotic thing.
We got money from the World Cinema Fund and all these sorts of things, and then we spent it all on getting the people out. So it took six months, getting the directors out and the participants out, then rehousing the documents all in Kenya. And then we got, like, mental health support for everyone, but then the money ran out. Tens of thousands of pounds were spent on getting people out, the production budget went. You’ve got maybe 15 people across different areas of Sudan, all needing documents, clandestine routes, air tickets, buses, food, and travel liaisons. We got a couple of weeks of trauma care, sitting together, rethinking: How is everyone? Does everyone want to continue? From then onwards, two things kind of emerged. One is for everybody; there was a bigger picture of life, death, and loss, so nobody really spent their time arguing about the film. And second, the film became a kind of cathartic process, a reason to contribute energy, a reason to do something, not just be a refugee. So then it was about trying to find a way creatively to continue which didn’t cost any money.
How did you find a way to continue?
We had the footage that we shot in Sudan, but didn’t know what to do next. Part of the story is the participants going out of Sudan, but we couldn’t film them getting out. It was too dangerous to go back and film. It was a challenge to get them out in the first place. We were experimenting a lot with green screen, with interviews, all of that, and we just wanted to have different options so that later on in the edit, we would find the best way to tell the story. We tried animation, interviews, reenactments, and also, because we watched a couple of films, and it really worked, especially in the conditions that we were in. There was a film called Neighbor Abdi, which was doing reenactment in a green screen about the war in Somalia. So that was a great approach, especially in countries where you can’t go back anymore, war zones.
The creativity came because we had no footage. So it was like, where’s the story? Well, it’s inside all of our subjects. We did the reconstructions, and we also asked people to dream or remember a physical geographical memory of space. It’s realizing that we all carry physical space as memory inside us.
How was finding and getting different people to agree to share their stories? How did they feel about reenacting things?
In Sudan, we don’t have that camera culture, you know, like everyone sees the camera as something that’s going to expose them, so it took us a while until we gained their trust. Actually, as directors, we reenacted our own things, and that vulnerability, you know, allowed them to open up, because now we don’t have that director-participant hierarchy, right, like how we were in Sudan. Now we’re all just in one building, sharing together our pains, griefs, and even happy moments, everything. You’re not opening up to someone you don’t know or don’t trust. It’s the same person that you wake up next to in the morning, and then you go to sleep at the end of the day, having breakfast and lunch. We would already have these conversations off-screen during the day, so now it’s just a matter of recording what you’re saying. So then they felt like, okay, they were even more excited to actually open up about what they’ve been through, their dreams and ambitions, looking for a better day, a future away from war.
We were also never quite sure whether the directors would be in the film or not. So if you see, it gets like meta, meta: filming of the process, the filming of the directors, and then the filming behind [the scenes].
I think one of the strongest elements that came through was the bonds that were developed.
It was stories about these five individuals in the city of Khartoum, and also these different layers and social classes, the difference between the kids, the tea vendor and Jawad [resistance volunteer], and other characters that were there. So it’s like an overview of the city of Khartoum, because there are so many tribes in Sudan, and how, to some extent, they’re living together in harmony, but also the underlying layer of what’s erupting and boiling beneath. Because at the end, there was a full-scale war that happened, not overnight, but it was something that was being crafted for years. So we wanted to spotlight all these different people from different ethnicities and different social classes.
This film could never have been made without the circumstances of the war. And I say that because the participants would never have all sat together and been together, because they’re all from such different social classes, ethnicities. Majdi [civil servant] would never touch Wilson and Lokain, the boys would never touch Majdi, and suddenly they’re all sharing the same mattress behind the camera. The directors are also from very different backgrounds, genders, and ethnicities. So before the war, there wasn’t a bond. They were young filmmakers coming together. But after the war, everyone was living in one space. So that’s what cemented it. The creativity was born out of circumstance, and the unity was born out of the collective experience of war and displacement.
Now that it’s out in the world, how do you feel, and what’s next?
My next movie is pretty much also about war, but in the same way as how Kharotum was made. It’s not directed to the war; it’s not a war movie, but it’s always there in the background. All my stories, whether I like it or not, are evolving around Sudan right now. I think sometimes I should do films that aren’t necessarily relevant to what’s happening, but it’s our responsibility to document what’s happening right now in this part of history. Because it’s very necessary for me and future generations to know what was happening in the 2023 war and what led to it, and how people were living, because the only thing that we can learn through is history. Whether it’s reading books or watching movies. I think things weren’t really documented that well over the last few decades. And that’s why we keep doing the same thing over and over.
I think one of the differences between me and the filmmakers is that I know films can fail and disappear. I think they all had great belief in it, and what we were doing was kind of creatively bold, so it could have been a disaster. And I think the grounding point was that even if it did fail, at least it was a document that would suffice for a city and time before the war. All the footage that we filmed in the workshop, you know, it was a Khartoum that no longer existed. So even if the film failed, the film, the work, and the documentary would still have a value.
Can we start with how the film started?