Filming a forgotten war

British director shines a light on Sudan horror as he tells the stories of five who escaped from hell of Khartoum

- BY JACKIE ANNETT and FRAN BOWDEN

LIKE so many great stories, Phil Cox's film about Khartoum starts in a prison cell... his own.

In 2017, after making a report for C4 News, he was jailed for three months in Sudan's capital Khartoum during the rule of dictator President Omar al-Bashir.

Seeing his detention as an opportunity, Phil, 50, started making contacts.

He says: "I made a lot of friends. I met anyone who was anyone, some very kind people, political leaders and artists."

After al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, Phil returned to Sudan in 2021 amid a coup against the military-civilian government. The film director, from Hackney, East London, then started tracking down some of the people he had met in jail.

Phil, who has won awards working as part of Native Voice Films collective for outlets such as Netflix and HBO, then got British Council funding.

For eight months he filmed stories in the capital of the northeast African country, supplying phones to locals to record their lives. Phil says: "We decided to make a poem of the city."