For the fiftieth episode, Phil Cox talks about Khartoum, a documentary that premiered at Sundance and then won the Peace Film Prize at the Berlinale, and that exists at all only because five filmmakers refused to let a war end their film.
We don’t want to make reportage. We don’t want to make news.
A Film Blown Apart and Reassembled
The project began around 2021 as an iPhone-shot workshop at the Sudan Film Factory, conceived as a lyrical poem of the city in the tradition of the old silent symphonies of urban life. Cox, who is British and has worked in Sudan since 2004, was one of five directors, alongside Sudanese filmmakers Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim “Snoopy” Ahmad, and Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, each paired with one of the film’s participants: a civil servant, a tea seller, a resistance-committee volunteer, and two young bottle collectors. Then, in April 2023, war erupted between the military and the Rapid Support Forces, the capital was bombed, and the entire production, filmmakers and subjects alike, had to flee to Nairobi. They had no footage of the war and none of their own escapes. So in a cramped shared apartment in exile, they rebuilt the film from nothing, using green-screen reconstructions, recorded dreams, and animation, with the participants reenacting the worst days of their lives.
The Method Is the Meaning
Here’s the stance worth drawing out, because Cox keeps describing the approach as a budget-driven necessity, the thing they did because they had no other footage. But the necessity produced something a conventional war documentary structurally cannot. News footage of Khartoum burning would record the event; it would not record what the event did to the people who survived it, which is the actual subject. By filming people trying, and sometimes failing, and breaking down while attempting to re-perform a checkpoint or a goodbye to a mother, the film captures the one thing reportage always misses: the interior wreckage, the way violence keeps happening in a body long after the smoke clears. The seams are the point. When you see the microphone in frame and a person struggling to relive a moment, you are not watching a re-creation of an event, you are watching its aftermath surface in the present tense. The structure follows from the same logic. With no footage of the war or the escapes to anchor a middle, Cox could not tell the story forward, so he told it backward, opening at the end so the only question that matters is how these people got here, then fragmenting time freely. To keep five characters and four storylines from scattering, he made the participants appear inside each other’s reconstructions, one playing the soldier, another the mother, another the son.
Refusing the Crisis Frame
This is why Cox’s Sudanese colleagues were adamant about what they would not make. They were done being cast as informative figures of African crisis, objects of pity in someone else’s news cycle. They wanted to be bold, to use dreams and play.
Being able to have confidence in the work you’ve done, not whether you’re in a festival or not.
That refusal is more than a political preference; it is a claim about knowledge. Crisis footage reduces people to evidence of a catastrophe, while reconstruction hands them back their authorship, letting them choose which moment to relive, play the soldier in each other’s stories, and narrate their own dreams of flying over the city. Cox drew the method from a filmmaker he openly admires, the Argentine artist Lola Arias, whose Theatre of War brings real Falklands veterans together to reenact their combat with the studio apparatus left deliberately visible.
The film also belongs in conversation with two works Cox does not name: Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, which reconstructs war trauma through animation and dream, and Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, which rebuilds an atrocity by hand precisely because no footage of it exists, exactly Khartoum’s predicament.
A Film With No Boss
The collective structure enacts the same ethic. Five directors, no single author. Each of his Sudanese colleagues burrowed deep into a single character, slept beside them, ate with them, while Cox’s job was to piece the four threads together. There was no creative jockeying, he says, because everyone was escaping the same war, people had lost homes and family, and the shared stakes kept the work calm and purposeful. They were people who answered, as Cox puts it, only to themselves. When the structure stalled late in the edit, exhausted alongside his editor Yousef Jubeh, he brought in a consultant editor whose tiny adjustments, shaving seconds here and there, finally made the film cohere, a lesson he frames as knowing when your own fatigue means it is time for a fresh voice. There was no broadcaster on the line asking them to explain their country; the money came from grants and funds, the World Cinema Fund, the Doha Film Institute, and others, with the most harrowing budget decision of the production being whether to spend everything to evacuate the filmmakers out of danger. The thing the war tried to scatter, a community, a city, a shared authorship, is precisely what the film’s method rebuilds, which is why Cox calls it resistance rather than reportage. A documentary about the destruction of Khartoum, made by the scattered citizens of Khartoum reassembling their city in a Nairobi green screen out of memory and dream, does not describe resistance from the outside. It is an act of it.
Who Phil Cox Is
Cox came to film by an unlikely route. He studied languages and literature, fancied himself a romantic poet, and while traveling in Latin America wandered into the famous film school at San Antonio de los Banos in Cuba at twenty-one, was asked to help translate for some filmmakers, fell into a documentary, and within days knew this was it. His relationship with Sudan runs two decades deep and is far from safe: he covered the war in Darfur as a journalist, and on a later return was kidnapped by militias and held in a political prison for months. He went back quietly in 2021 to reconnect with friends and contribute to the filmmaking community there, which is how the Khartoum project began.
The Ecosystem and the Last Crutch
That hard-won confidence carries into the half of the conversation the episode is named for, the brutal economics of getting films seen. Cox is clear-eyed that festivals are deeply political, that the obsession with world premieres leaves strong work unseen, and that the warmth around a Sundance and Berlinale run cools fast once the next cycle begins. His answer is twofold. First, hold the value of the work inside yourself rather than outsourcing it to programmers and broadcasters. Second, get inventive about distribution: he is an evangelist for the hybrid approach, chasing down every outlet a film can reach, broadcast slots and airlines and the full sprawl of video on demand, on the logic that the more places you imagine your film into, the more places it ends up. Underneath it all is the conviction he keeps returning to, that in a precarious ecosystem the most durable thing filmmakers have is each other, the solidarity of recognizing one another’s work, filmmaker to filmmaker. It is, he says, the last crutch, and worth holding onto. He talks too about self-care and longevity as practical survival skills, keeping two or three projects alive at once so that when one hits a wall, the energy can shift to another, and leaning on a community that quietly trades its own horror stories about the business. Looking after yourself, mentally and financially, he suggests, is not separate from the work; it is what allows the work to keep going at all.
