Hot Docs 2025 - Khartoum Review

Khartoum wastes 0% of its audiences’ time. From the very first frame, it locks you into its bizarre but oddly effective (not to mention terribly elaborate) narrative template. This template involves asking a group of people (children and adults alike) to reenact/help reenact traumatizing experiences that led them to flee from their hometown—- a non-fiction storytelling that is comparable to what Oppenheimer utilized throughout The Act of Killing. These vignettes of pain and excessive violence are brutal to watch from an outsider perspective. 

However, it may be even more of a gut-punch to see these incredible people breakdown with emotion in the midst of telling their personal stories. The director and his team always face these moments with compassion and affirming empathy, there’s never any exploitation involved; this film’s core sentiments would turn its nose up at such behaviour. 

The utilization of green screen allowed the documentary to function on a level of visual-presentation that isn’t commonly seen in contemporary cinema. Commonly, as the people describe situations inside of this green screen cube, objects and backgrounds will begin phasing in via chroma key, finishing the image that they’re painting with their words. It’s an engaging, intimate and attention-grabbing portrait of Khartoum's violence.

Hot Docs 2025 runs until tomorrow, May 4th. Tickets can be purchased at hotdocs.ca.