Among the films screened at this year’s New African Film Festival held in Silver Spring, MD between March 13-26 was the 2025 “Khartoum;” a documentary that follows five subjects from different walks of life and their respective unique yet tragically similar experiences in the eve and wake of the outbreak of civil war in Sudan in 2023.
Memorable from “Khartoum,” is its ability to immerse the viewer into Sudan’s capital, a character in its own right. We are greeted with Khartoum’s sounds, colors, and effervescent hope through a street tea vendor, Khadmallah–whose roadside set up turns into sacred halls for airing the issues facing Sudan. In Khadmallah’s words, Khartoum, “has its routine and its secret corners.” She works in one such corner where a “people in revolution,” as she describes the restless but relatively peaceful pre-war days in Khartoum, speak unencumbered: “Let’s be honest,” opines a customer of hers, “we need a real revolution.”
“Sudan is the way it is because there is a fixation on ethnicity rather [than] on national identity. We really have an identity crisis. One part says we’re African, the other says we’re Arab. But in reality we’re all African,” says Khadmallah.
Through the eyes of the civil servant, Majdi, Sudan’s troubles started because two strongmen, Hemedti and al-Burhan, could not see beyond their behemoth ego that was large enough to tear an entire country apart.
For the two orphaned boys, Lokain and Wilson, who make their living collecting and selling discarded plastic items from the streets, the rupture of their beloved city is as senseless as the world they lived in before the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and launched a scourge that has since been called the worst humanitarian crisis of our time.
“The rubbish is our treasure,” they say, “plastic bottles are gold. These parts of Khartoum are ours.” For them, children in the outskirts of a society, shunned by adults, the war is the work of grown-ups. At once, Wilson pointedly says, “Why did adults start all this mess? You all started this war.”
Our final subject is Jawad, the resistance committee volunteer who leaves for Cairo before the war breaks out in earnest. He says, “People like me have never seen democracy, [yet] we were all ready to build a new Sudan.”
“Khartoum” weaves together their stories by not only assigning a primary director for each subject, who then work together to stitch the stories in a single narrative form; but also by having each of them relive their respective memories of where they were when the war first touched them.
Either through a violent, near-death encounter with an RSF soldier or hiding under furniture with their loved ones while calamity hails from the skies, their encounter with war is reenacted and narrated by each subject; this is coupled with the creative use of the green screen, with the other four playing the roles of either a soldier, a child, a mother, a brother, or anyone who was part of the moment that decided their leaving Sudan. In one scene, Wilson plays the role of Majdi’s son; in another, Jawad plays the role of an RSF soldier that kills a civilian in front of Khadmallah’s eyes.
The film’s stylistic flair is perhaps its unique use of the green screen. It’s a tool that makes alive, as much as a green screen can, the Khartoum that has since been razed to the ground. Yet the film is aware of its own limitations and works to rectify it. We’re periodically shown the green screen itself, with no special projections, as the directors and subjects discuss how to reenact Jawad’s favorite memory before the war, or Majdi’s and Khadmallah’s eyewatering moments, as they relive the trauma through the reenactment. By showing these moments that makes the viewer privy to what feel like scenes that should have been cut, the documentarians in actuality remove a layer of filter and distance that any film or work of art seeking to represent the complexity of the human experience necessarily faces.
“Khartoum” does not only hold the independent stories of Lokain, Wilson, Majdi, Jawad and Khadmallah, but is rather the story of a people and a city of routine, secret corners and revolution. It is a Khartoum of revolutionary hope, but also a Khartoum that is no longer the same because those that left will never be the same. “Khartoum,” adds a whole new dimension to the nary realized but poignant truth, “You can’t go home again.”
The film’s singular salience is its ability to capture the disparate lives of its subjects that makes what seems like the most mundane the height of life itself. And at the center are African workers’ stories; however much they may disagree on the cause of war, their love and pride in their African identity is palpable.
It is after all no accident that the final line uttered by Majdi is, “We’ll survive this and emerge stronger. I’m very proud to be Sudanese. ‘Oh, how tall we stand!’ I am African. I am Sudanese.”
It is an identity that, like Khadmallah, the African People’s Socialist Party understands transcends the colonial borders imposed on Africa. This “civil war” that has made refugees or exiles of all of our subjects, filmmakers and countless other African people, presupposes the legitimacy of the colonial borders imposed on us. It’s a war that allows for the colonial powers to roil Africa with violence and instability, that further streamlines the plunder and exploitation of Africa’s resources. The colonial mode of production, today’s world economic system, was born from the worst humanitarian crisis—it is the perpetrator of the humanitarian crisis.
However, with the Party’s work to build institutions like the African Socialist International,uniting African people under the banner of ‘One Africa for Africans’ is not a utopian dream never to be attained, but a material reality that the fruits of our labor today promises.
Build the African Socialist International!
Liberation in our lifetime!
For a playlist inspired by this documentary, visit www.tinyurl.com/MyCountryAfrica
