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Khartoum 

Where the Blue and White Niles meet and merge into the Nile River of Northeastern Africa, there is the city of Khartoum, home to about 6.3 million residents. The pulse of economics and culture lie within the center of the Sudanese capital, just south of Egypt. On April 15, 2023, due to a coup, a savage civil war erupted between two former allies, the Sudanese Armed Forces, which is the national Army, Airforce, and Navy of Sudan and the Rapid Support Forces, a regional paramilitary group of a previous regime. As a consequence of strife over the ousting of the Omar al- Bashir dictatorship in 2019, a group of filmmakers were dangerously caught in the middle. 

While filming Khartoum in Khartoum, Sudan, directors Rawia Alhag, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, Anas Saeed, Ibrahim Snoopy and British director Phil Cox, made an incredible escape to safety in the middle of brutal warfare using their film production funds. Gathering all their strength while struggling with shock and starvation, the crew fled from Sudan and found refuge in Nairobi, Kenya. Once they decided to continue making the film and after several months mixed communication via electronic and non-electronic means, the team were able to find the original five traditional and modern Sudanese natives that were to be featured in their film. Lacking identification due to it either being destroyed or stripped from them, yet with undeterred courage and sheer desire to share their stories, the films subjects: Majdi, the civil servant; Khadmallah, the tea lady; Jawad, the resistance committee member; and Wilson and Lokain, the young bottle collectors, all made it safely to Nairobi. There are many kilometers to consider when fleeing from Sudan to Kenya, yet by what they said were “creative means”, the filmmakers and their subjects all reunited to complete the mission. 

There was still usable footage filmed in Khartoum prior to the conflict, however, due to the new reality of the backdrop of the film being war ravaged, the directors had to pivot. Using greenscreen technology, the five Sudanese subjects reenacted their efforts of trusting in freedom, clinging to hope and joy, while surviving conflict, exile and revolution. Khartoum is the masterpiece that was produced. Following a random thought Phil Cox says he had to submit the film when speaking with Deseret News, Khartoum premiered in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the Egyptian Theatre on Main Street in Park City, for Sundance Film Festival 2025.  

The Guardian reports that the UN has described the conflict in Sudan as “one of the worst humanitarian nightmares in recent history.” Since the beginning of the warfare, over 100,000 civilian lives have been lost and nearly 20 million Sudanese people are in peril, having been forced to escape from their homeland. Most or all of them are experiencing devastating displacement, terrifying food insecurities, and a collapsed healthcare system. Sudan’s outlook is dangerously bleak, and the country could be facing utter famine and malnutrition. Khartoum filmmakers hope that after they present the film on Capitol Hill and the United Nations in New York, that it will be a positively urgent move in the direction of healing and recovery for the country of Sudan. 

How to Build a Library

In downtown Nairobi, two Kenyan women—a writer named Wanjiru ‘Shiro’ Koinange and Angela Wachuka, a publisher—unite to tackle the rigorous task of transforming what used to be a privately owned, deteriorated whites-only library. Built by British settlers and segregated up until 1958, the oldest library in Kenya is now currently owned by the Nairobi City Council.  Within the library lies the history of colonialism in Kenya, yet completely devoid of Kenyan culture. How to Build a Library delves into the dedicated duo’s intentions to refurbish the McMillian Memorial Library within Kenya’s capital city and to create a decolonized and modernized, vibrant venue that actually benefits Kenyans. Their mission does not end there, as the women are refurbishing additional branches of McMillan Memorial libraries in the neighborhoods of Kaloleni and Makadara. 

Through a plethora of red tape and bureaucratic blues, married movie makers—Kenyan director and musician Maia Lekow and Australian award-winning filmmaker Christopher King—alongside Academy Award winning executive producer, Roger Ross Williams, document the story of How to Build a Library. Shiro and Wachuka determine how to balance compromising for progress without completely compromising their ultimate goal or themselves. The film illustrates a feat that seems to be selfishly political and superfluously challenging and how the Dewey Decimal System and its European preferences interfere with what is best for Africans, according to an MSN article. In 2024, protests in Kenya postponed McMillans refurbishment, however the libraries in Makadara and Kaloleni were completed. Visit Book Bunk for more information. 

Both Khartoum and How to Build a Library are awaiting distribution post premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance Film Festival 2025. 

For more information on film submissions, tap in with the Sundance Institute.

 

 

Photo Credits: Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance (Khartoum, How to Build a Library)