Also screens on Sunday, October 19 | 12:15 PM | BB
Originally planned as a slice-of-life documentary about the everyday joys and struggles of five very different citizens of Sudan’s largest city, Khartoum turned into a completely different film with the advent of civil war in 2023, which decimated the city. It became a story of how you put your life back together after war tears it apart, and how you mourn a beloved city that can never be anything close to what it was before. The individual stories of these five Sudanese navigating a nightmarish “new normal” are all deeply affecting, and taken together, they pack a real emotional wallop. The five directors—each director filmed a single story from beginning to end—handle the material beautifully, even incorporating AI to recreate parts of their old lives. (Surprisingly, it works very well.) Even more surprisingly, the film is not a downer. These five stories—with subjects ranging from a pair of 10-year-old brothers to an elderly man—have traumatic moments, certainly, but the overall message is one of resilience and hope in the face of adversity. ~SM