KHARTOUM – the making of a film

KHARTOUM is an extraordinary love poem to a city and its people. As its creative director Phil Cox writes, its innovative approach was born out of a response to war and a rejection of the way in which the media usually tells stories about conflict in Africa.

It’s June 2026 and our UK-Sudan feature documentary KHARTOUM is playing on BBC iPlayer and in venues across the UK and globally. From the outside, it’s a success story – a new collaborative world cinema documentary that overcame great adversity to tell the story of Sudanese citizens at war. A film offering a window into the tragically under-reported Sudanese conflict affecting over 22 million of its citizens. From the inside, as the creative director and writer of this film, I feel a mass of emotions ranging from disbelief that it was completed at all, to pride in the small world cinema family that overcame so many obstacles to produce it. 

Our project began as a small workshop in 2021 in Khartoum, led by my indie company, Native Voice Films, with the Sudan Film Factory and a seed grant from the British Council. Due to the unforeseen outbreak of war, this project expanded from a series of short workshop films to a full-on collaborative cinema feature made as a creative statement against war. With hindsight, I still wonder how we managed it. 

This film was only possible because it was shot on donated iPhones

One major reason is the ‘how’, which was low tech and low budget. We started and finished on donated iPhones in a collaboration between four new talent Sudanese filmmakers, Anas Saeed, Rawia Al Hag, Brahim Snoopy and Timeea M. Ahmed, together with Palestinian-Irish editor, Yousef Jubeh, and me, a British writer and director. 

iPhones on the streets of Khartoum were less likely to get you arrested or shot. Nevertheless,  the police or military would still check footage, and the wrong image or sequence could mean the end. It was a real tightrope. To make the best use of them, they also had to be close, often within breathing distance of the participants. This created the unique and intimate feel of the film. 

Our team was made up of fearless documentary indies

The second reason was the ‘who’ – our team was made up of fearless documentary indies, working outside of broadcaster timelines or editorial constraints. In making KHARTOUM, we were essentially our own bosses creatively and financially. When producers, Giovanna Stopponi and Talal Afifi, determined that the escape and physical and mental wellbeing of the whole film team was the priority, it led to the eradication of our small budget, but it created an unbreakable new family bonded by war and cinema. 

The film KHARTOUM mixes stark verité street realities with green screen reconstructions and animation graphics. It’s a modern and personal take on documentary storytelling in sub-Saharan Africa, set against a Sudan in revolution, a military coup, and eventually total war. 

The film features five Sudanese citizens caught up in a city at war

The film reveals the emotions and inner worlds of five very different Sudanese citizen-participants, struggling to stay alive amidst their country’s turmoil. These five participants, through raw street filming and lyrical animated dream sequences, convey what it is to be caught up in a city in conflict, becoming refugees for the first time: Majdi, the civil servant, flies on a racing pigeon smoking a shisha over his burning city; Lokain and Wilson, two young Khartoum street-boys, ride a lion through gun-toting militias, and Jawad, a Sufi Rastafarian motorbiker, flies upwards over the Sudanese pyramids only to land at the Hollywood Hills. Khadmallah, a tea vendor and single mum, sings her hope to protect her child, under a blooming tree on the Nuba Mountains. 

I’ve worked in Sudan since 2004 both as a journalist, a filmmaker, and as a media and cultural collaborator with Sudanese colleagues. Due to geography, language and a lack of interest from broadcasters, it’s never easy to bring Sudanese stories to UK screens. They are often limited to news reports of war, suffering and refugees, so the only time the UK public would see Sudanese people is as victims or perpetrators.

The challenge of telling richer and deeper stories about Sudan

Many filmmakers and journalists strive to have longer time frames to give depth to those in front of our cameras, but the outlets for such work are limited. KHARTOUM, as an independent work, is an exception and although undoubtedly tougher to make than a commissioned documentary, it had the space to paint a deep and rich holistic canvas of the city of Khartoum and five of its unique citizens. It is also led by Sudanese voices and filmmakers in their own city and their own language which gives the work great depth and an indelible authenticity. 

Our working process was simple; each filmmaker focused on reaching a poetic depth and dream intimacy with participants Majdi, Khadmallah, Lokain, Wilson and Jawad. I would then share different visual possibilities to link these individual stories into one cinematic film. 

We trusted audiences to find the city of Khartoum in these stories 

We weren’t  afraid to break form, and we trusted audiences to simply watch and find the city of Khartoum in the faces and small acts of its people. Khartoum is a city but also for me a state of mind. It’s a fusion of all that is Sudan, incredible diversity and coexistence, yet always balancing a powder keg of entrenched political elites, corruption and rival military powers. 

Our creative process, where we created dreamscapes, led to a non-linear structure that reveals an emotional memory to a city now destroyed. It also weaves a coup, a revolution, a civil war and the destruction of Khartoum through graphic animation FX and a vérité documentary.  

We put emotion first and information second

The power of the storytelling is in our creativity and an intention to lead with emotion and experience over information. There is beauty and fun in this film. Audiences laugh whilst watching struggle and endurance. We worked collaboratively and sensitively with the participants and invited them to reflect their inner worlds, memories and dreams as much as their physical journeys of survival. The result is a dynamic hybrid between vérité and graphic animated narrative that provides an immersive viewing experience. KHARTOUM is a cinematic poem and homage to an incredible metropolis and its people.  

As a group of very different filmmakers, from Sudan, the UK, Palestine and Italy, we’re proud that we stayed united, that we worked to keep each other safe and that we always prioritised the physical and mental well-being of the team. We have all learnt from each other, and we all understood the value and importance of what we were doing: creating a film that documents a moment in Sudan’s history, a film honouring the resilient and enduring heartbeat of the Sudanese people. That it is now accessible inside millions of UK households on iPlayer and in venues globally, is a testament both to independent and collaborative world cinema and also to a small group of filmmakers who became a family. 

For more information see www.khartoummovie.com 

IBT and IOM are hosting a screening and Q&A discussion of KHARTOUM at the BFI on Friday 19 June.

Phil Cox is one of the writers and directors of KHARTOUM