Themenschwerpunkt. When War Shapes Form: Rethinking Khartoum

In the organizer's words:

With film excerpts from "Khartoum" (Sudan, UK, D, Qatar 2025, 80') and in dialog with editor Yousef Yubeh, co-producer Frank W. Albers shares background information on the development of the film from a documentary project to a hybrid film. The war in Sudan led the Sudanese directors to pursue new approaches: while the storytelling and artistic approach were greatly modified, the attitude of the work remained unchanged. Despite the outbreak of the devastating war in Sudan during production, the team and protagonists managed to get safely to a neighboring country and continue working with editor Yousef Yubeh on location. The task now was to find more innovative and creative ways to portray the now destroyed Khartoum and the new inner and outer realities of the protagonists. The joint work on new forms of stytelling with SFX, graphic animation and green screen now interweaves observational documentary film with dream sequences and biographical reconstructions and opened up new creative possibilities for the entire team. The completion of the work is a cinematic testament to the flexibility of creativity and the importance of culture, lived experience and memory at a time when these are most under threat - its success at the premiere at Sundance in January and at the Berlinale in February 2025 brought this hybrid form and its message to international attention.