A coup, a film and an unlikely family

A blindfolded camel walks in a circle powering a traditional sesame oil press on the dusty outskirts of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan.

That opening and recurring scene in “Khartoum” is a metaphor for the African and Arab nation that has had less than a year of elected government since gaining independence nearly 70 years ago. Perhaps no place on earth has experienced as many military coups as Sudan in the last half century. It has become a never-ending loop.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this week, a first for a Sudanese production. The directors and producers sat for an interview with the Deseret News at a Park City hotel, talking about the production they intended to make and how the outbreak of yet another war forced them to change direction.

Sundance provided them a chance to showcase their talents and exposed audiences to the plight of Sudan that has gone underreported in the West.

“We can be the voice of Sudanese people. We can ask the world to stand with us. We can ask the world to look at Sudan, to take care of what’s happening there,” Rawia Alhag, one of the directors, said in Arabic, with translation from Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, another director.

It was during a period of relative calm in 2022 that the young Sudanese filmmakers set out to make “a piece of poetic cinema, a poem about the city,” said British director Phil Cox.

Strategically located where the Blue Nile and White Nile rivers meet to form the Nile River, Khartoum is the economic and cultural center of Sudan where the traditional and modern coexist.

Alhag, Ahmed and two other filmmakers, Anas Saeed and Ibahim Snoopy, joined with Cox to chronicle the lives of five people in the city: a civil servant, a tea stall owner, a resistance committee volunteer, and two young boys collecting plastic bottles for money.

The project was almost finished in April 2023 when the city erupted into civil war between two powerful military factions: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The roots of the conflict trace back to the complex political and military landscape following the ousting of long-time dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019. Through its long history of conflict, war had never touched the 6.3 million residents of Khartoum.

The ongoing fighting, including a drone strike that killed 70 people at a hospital last week, triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises and has claimed 20,000 lives and displaced over 11 million people, according to the United Nations. Sudan also is confronting a growing famine with widespread starvation and surging malnutrition.

Fleeing war-ravaged Sudan

The filmmakers were among those who ultimately fled the country, using all their film production money.

“It was a hard decision because we didn’t flee by choice. It was by force. We stayed for more than six months. We didn’t see the end of this so we had to escape,” Saeed said in Arabic, with translation from Ahmed.

Traumatized and malnourished, they regrouped in Nairobi, Kenya, to decide whether to continue the film “as an act of resistance, as a statement,” Cox said. To do that, they would have to get their five subjects to Kenya, a dangerous proposition for people whose identification documents were burned or taken from them.

Over several months, often without means of electronic communication, the four Sudanese directors located Majdi, the civil servant; Khadmallah, the tea lady; Jawad, the resistance committee member; and Wilson and Lokain, the inseparable young bottle collectors. Using some creative means, they managed to get them to Nairobi. All of them wanted to tell their stories amid a new reality.

For the next six months, the filmmakers and participants lived together, shopped together, cooked together. They talked about what they had witnessed in Khartoum. Professional therapists helped them process the trauma. They became the unlikeliest of families. Majdi, Khadmallah, Jawad, Wilson and Lokain never would have met in Sudan.

“It would be like a Black kid from the projects in the Bronx living now with a banker from Long Island,” Cox said.

But it became a safe space for them to share their harrowing experiences.

An unlikely family affair

With war raging, it was too dangerous to film in the country. The filmmakers had no footage of the five people they were following. They decided to ask them to reenact their experiences of conflict and exile in front of a green screen.

But rather than just give them instructions, each director first took a traumatic moment in their own escape and reenacted it in front of the participants.

“It was a very difficult thing because we all lived the same situation,” Saeed said. “They were willing to open up then, telling us their stories because it happened to all of us.”

War became a catalyst that galvanized the filmmakers and participants in a united purpose, said Giovanna Stopponi, a producer.

“It was a mix of living together and producing,“ Ahmed said. ”It was very fascinating for me personally. I’ve never been in a production like that even in Sudan.”

Associate producer Yousef Jubeh said the group spent so much time together that opening up became natural. “It wasn’t so much about we have to film,” he said. “It’s more of a healing session.”

The reenactments were not just solo efforts. The participants brought each other in to play roles in their scenes. Jawad and Majdi became RSF soldiers as Wilson and Lokain recounted the army gunning down people in front of them. Jawad mourns as Majdi plays his friend killed in the fighting. Majdi and Jawad are soldiers threatening to kill Khadmallah.

“There wasn’t four separate stories. Everyone appears in everyone else’s story,” Cox said.

Reenacting their stories of survival and freedom through dreams, revolution and civil war triggered painful memories for the participants. The directors came out from behind the camera to give them a consoling hug when they broke down in tears.

“Having five directors can be your worst nightmare but there was a bigger picture where everyone was engaged emotionally. They really lost everything. There was a bigger picture of war going on and that put the film in a different context,” Cox said.

The change in direction also gave the filmmakers a cause to solicit funds to complete it.

“From a production point of view, it wasn’t just a beautiful, lyrical poem, a nicely crafted poem about the city of Khartoum. It became something else. That gave us the opportunity to go ahead and get international support,” Stopponi said.

Coming to America

In Utah, the Sudanese filmmakers experienced a series of firsts: snow, Taco Bell, 7-Eleven. But nothing they saw was unexpected. They’d seen it all in American movies.

“There is nothing not in the movies. It’s the same. That’s what cinema is for. I’m in Sudan, a 21 hours flight away and I know about all these people and cities and towns,” Ahmed said. “That’s the power of cinema. They influence us. We know them but they don’t know us.”

Adds Snoopy, “We came to America through movies and you go to Sudan through our movie.”

After Sundance, the filmmakers are going to Washington, D.C., to present “Khartoum” on Capitol Hill. They also hope to show it at the United Nations in New York.

“We just want to raise that voice. A lot of people are suffering. I think the peak of it is to reach out to world leaders then they can come up with a plan to help end this war,” Snoopy said.

The vast majority of films never reach an audience. The filmmakers didn’t want that to happen with “Khartoum.” Cox had a “random thought” to submit it to Sundance. Rather than reach out to connections he had with the festival, he simply submitted a rough cut online.

An email later arrived from Sundance asking the filmmakers if they could get on a phone call. The invitation sent them scrambling to prepare for what they thought they might be asked. On the call, they each gave their rehearsed answers. The person on the other end went silent: “Actually, my question was are you going to be able to come?”

That sent the directors and producers into a frenzy to polish the film and raise money to travel to Park City. They credit the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID — a federal agency that falls under President Donald Trump’s pause on much U.S. foreign aid — and other donors for helping support the project.

“The film was and is an opportunity. An opportunity that we can tell our narrative. The current, historical and the coming narrative in a poetic way that people can feel something towards it, not just numbers, not a report,” Ahmed said.

“We need the world to know and we felt responsible for that. It wasn’t just a production. It was the only chance that we can tell the Sudan story for the whole world.”

There’s no place like home

Cox said he hopes audiences see a bit of themselves in “Khartoum.”

“The film works so well because it has such a holistic, human sphere for each character. They’re all complex individuals like all of us in the room. They’re funny. They have dreams. They mess up,” he said.

Sudanese filmmakers Saeed, Alhag, Snoopy and Ahmed still live in Nairobi as do Khadmallah, Wilson and Lokain. Alhag, the only woman among the directors, has become the boys’ guardian. Jawad and Majdi live in Egypt.

The fighting in Sudan had dragged on for nearly two years now. Unlike wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the conflict in Sudan doesn’t make the nightly news. But it’s always on the minds of the filmmakers and their five subjects. Khartoum is their home. It’s an emotional space. It’s a memory space. They might have lost their physical homes but the sights, sounds and smells are always part of them.

Everyone in the film carries something of Khartoum with them and the filmmakers have brought it back out, Cox said.

And they long to be back there.

“Our dream is not just to return to Khartoum,” Alhag said. “Our dream is that the camel stops circling.”