Since 2023, the conflict has displaced over 11 million people, including the film’s four Sudanese directors and all Khartoum’s main characters. It took many months to relocate production to East Africa and rethink the film. Khartoum in its completed form became a new departure in cinematic storytelling as a composite of live action with animation, green screen reconstructions, and documentary dreamscapes telling stories of Sudanese life before and after the start of war.
Professor Erica Carter, Professor of German and Film
27 January 2025
Sudanese documentary supported by King's researchers premiered at Sundance
Khartoum, a Sudanese-UK documentary completed with input from King’s academics from the Departments of Digital Humanities and Film Studies, premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.
On 27 January, the Sundance Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Khartoum, a Sudanese-UK documentary co-produced by the UK indie company Native Films and the Sudan Film Factory, featuring archival contributions from the ‘Sudan Memory’ project led by King’s academics.
Khartoum tells the story of five citizens of the Sudanese capital who live their lives in the wake of the 2019 overthrow of the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who has been charged with war crimes and genocide. Filming began in Khartoum in 2022 but was interrupted in April 2023, when war in Sudan broke out.
King’s academics Marilyn Deegan, Professor of Digital Humanities, and Professor Erica Carter, film historian, curator and King’s Global Cultures Institute Fellow came on board as collaborators in 2024. They were approached by Khartoum producers to help source images for animations framing the film’s stories of war and flight.
Native Voice producers Phil Cox and Giovanna Stopponi worked with directors Anas Saaed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy and Timeea M. Ahmed to identify usable images from ‘Sudan Memory’. Professor Marilyn Deegan mobilised ‘Sudan Memory’ contributors to donate or licence content to recreate documentary dreamscapes of Khartoum streets and histories.
Working with the Native Voice team has highlighted how vital the work was that we did in ‘Sudan Memory’. Much of the cultural content we made available on the site is almost certainly now lost so being able to publicise it further through initiatives like the Khartoum film will bring the richness of the culture and the tragedy of its loss to a wider public.
Professor Marilyn Deegan, Professor of Digital Humanities
Professor Marilyn Deegan leads the Sudan Memory digital humanities project, the first phase of which was funded by the British Council and Aliph Foundation. The project has conserved and promoted valuable cultural materials from and about Sudan through digitisation and via an online platform. ‘Sudan Memory’ has opened for public access archives and collections that were hitherto largely inaccessible, as well as recording and recirculating valuable cultural records held in personal collections and stories.
Since 2018, ‘Sudan Memory’ has also established digitisation facilities in a range of cultural institutions throughout the country and worked to build capacity by training archive and museum staff as well as local independent collectors and culture practitioners. This digital archiving initiative was staged in partnership with the Sudanese Association for Archiving Knowledge (SUDAAK). A new grant of £100,000 was secured from the Arcadia Foundation in 2025 to safeguard Sudan Memory and explore the lessons it teaches for similar archive projects designed to safeguard documentary heritage in potential conflict zones.
Professor Erica Carter has collaborated with the Sudan Film Factory and Sudan Memory since 2020, working on King’s College and Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC)-funded curatorial and archiving projects to raise international awareness of Sudanese cinema and its formative experiences of exile and mass displacement.
The 2025 Sundance Film Festival is taking place from 23 January to 2 February in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. Since 1985, hundreds of films launched at this independent film festival have gone on to gain critical acclaim and reach new audiences worldwide.
At the festival, Khartoum will also participate in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, the winners of which will be announced on 31 January. The film will then travel to the Berlin International Film Festival for a European premiere between 13 and 23 February.
Khartoum is produced by Native Voice Films and the Sudan Film Factory with BBC Storyville, Gisa Productions, Ayin Network and XTR.
In this story
Professor of Digital Humanities and Honorary Research Fellow
Professor of German and Film