‘No Life on Mars,’ a new documentary following five Sudanese people across Sudan, Kenya and Spain, looks beyond the moment of flight to what displacement leaves behind. Through music, art, work and community, the film traces how people rebuild lives and carry pieces of home into new places.
Bonface Orucho, bird story agency
In 2020, Sudanese performance group The Nilers gathered at Pickwick Bar at the British Embassy in Khartoum for one of their sessions.
It was a different chapter for the collective. Khartoum was still home, and the musicians were building their sound in the city where their stories had begun. Their sessions brought people together around music, culture and community.
This October, The Nilers are preparing another gathering, this time in Nairobi, at the Nubian Art Gallery, as Sudanese artists and cultural organisers continue creating spaces for their community outside the country. The gallery has already hosted The Nilers and other Sudanese artists in 2026, including a June performance that brought live music, contemporary art, Sudanese food and cultural exchange together in Nairobi.
Between those two gatherings lies a much larger story.
It is the story of what happens to people when the place where they built their lives becomes unsafe, and what they carry with them when they begin trying to build another life somewhere else.
That is the question at the centre of No Life on Mars, a 61-minute documentary produced by the Idris Foundation and created and executive produced by filmmaker Imad Yassin, with Mohamed Chawky as director. Filmed across Sudan, Kenya and Spain, the documentary follows five Sudanese people whose established lives were disrupted by the war that began in April 2023.
The film moves through the lives of people who had careers, families, friendships, creative lives and ambitions before war changed the direction of their lives.
There is Jawaher Abdalla, a young woman from the refugee camps around Kassala who hoped to become a cardiologist. There is Dr Ronnie Shaoul, who spent decades building a career in academia and the food industry while collecting and supporting Sudanese art. There is Tahleel Dafalla, a singer, songwriter and cultural organiser who had been the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of Sudan’s all-female music collective Salute Yal Bannot.
There is also Dr Ahmed Dafalla, a doctor and former UN health economist who uses art and cultural work to support communities, and Mohamed Siddig, known as Mozimuse, a musician whose artistic path began in Khartoum and continued after his move to Kenya.
Their stories begin with displacement, but the film spends much of its time asking what comes after the journey.
Yassin did not originally set out to make this film.
The documentary grew from an earlier idea about displaced people and the ways they continued to pursue their ambitions despite difficult circumstances. Yassin had spent time visiting refugee camps and was struck by what he saw when visitors returned from them.
Instead of simply coming away depressed, he said, some people returned with a greater appreciation for the determination of those living in difficult conditions.
His team had identified people who would participate in the project when the war broke out. For months, Yassin watched Khartoum being destroyed and questioned whether the project should continue.
Then the focus changed.
“What if we made a film not only about displaced communities within Sudan, but about a new displaced community, people who had full lives in Sudan and then lost them?” Yassin told bird story agency in an interview.
For a period, he called the project From Host to Guest.
The phrase described the reversal he was witnessing. Sudan had for years hosted people displaced from other countries. Now Sudanese people who had established lives there were themselves becoming guests elsewhere.
The idea also shifted the film away from documenting the moment of escape alone.
Yassin wanted to follow people beyond the pain and understand how they dealt with the years that came afterwards.
That approach is consistent with how the film has been described publicly. Rather than focusing only on the geography of displacement, No Life on Mars follows its emotional consequences, from the shock of losing home to the difficult process of acceptance, healing and rebuilding.
Yassin wanted audiences to see the people in the film before they became part of displacement statistics.
They had jobs to go to, people to meet, places they loved and plans for the future.
Then those plans were interrupted.
“I wanted people to put faces to those numbers,” Yassin explained.
That distinction runs through No Life on Mars.
A displacement figure can show the scale of a crisis. It cannot show what happens when a doctor loses the professional world built over decades, when an artist loses a collection, when a musician leaves the city where his career began or when a young student has to reconsider the future she had imagined for herself.
For Tahleel, leaving Sudan also revealed something about the place she had left behind.
In the film, she reflects on how she did not realise how much she loved her country, her home and her city until she was separated from them.
Home becomes clearer in its absence.
For Ronnie, displacement carried the loss of things built over a lifetime. His collection of Sudanese art was destroyed in the war, taking with it objects that represented not only personal investment but a connection to Sudan’s cultural history.
For Mozimuse, the loss was tied to a different kind of inheritance.
He had begun making music in Khartoum in 2011. His path had also included engineering and visual design before music became an important part of his identity. In Kenya, he has continued performing with The Nilers, whose work has become part of Nairobi’s Sudanese cultural scene.
His journey is one of several in the film that show how displacement can move a person’s life into a different cultural setting without erasing the life that came before.
Kenya becomes particularly important to that process.
Yassin and his team interviewed nearly 60 to 70 people while developing the documentary, looking for different experiences of displacement and different ways Sudanese people were responding to it.
The choice to include Kenya was also deliberate.
“We wanted to show that migration doesn’t only happen to the West,” Yassin explained. “Migration also happens within Africa.”
That movement changes the way displacement is understood.
For some Sudanese people who have moved to Kenya, the new country is geographically and culturally closer than destinations further away. Similarities in social life and cultural references can make parts of the transition easier, even though finding work, rebuilding networks and navigating a new system still bring their own difficulties.
And the movement is creating new cultural connections.
Nairobi’s creative spaces have become part of that process. Nubian Art Gallery, for example, has hosted Sudanese musicians and artists throughout 2026 and has also created programmes bringing Sudanese and Kenyan artists together. Its current Rising Together exhibition, running from September 25 to October 25, brings Sudanese and Kenyan artists from different generations into the same space.
For Yassin, such spaces show that displaced people are not simply waiting for circumstances to change.
They are creating.
Sudanese artists affected by the war have been building audiences and cultural networks in countries including Kenya, Egypt, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, using music, painting and poetry to keep their culture visible while adapting to new environments.
The Nilers are one example.
Their 2020 sessions in Khartoum belonged to a city where the collective had built its musical identity. Their Nairobi performances belong to another stage of that journey.
The significance is in the distance between the two places.
The musicians are carrying sounds from Sudan into a different city while also creating something new around them.
That process can be seen in Nairobi’s wider Sudanese cultural scene. Earlier this year, The Nilers performed at Nubian Art Gallery alongside DJ Jaguar, with Sudanese food, traditional coffee and tea and contemporary art forming part of the evening.
The music becomes both a memory and a way of participating in the present.
That is the kind of transition No Life on Mars is interested in.
The documentary also follows another part of rebuilding that is less visible from the outside, the psychological cost of displacement.
Yassin said following people over time showed him that displacement cannot be understood only through shelter, employment or physical safety.
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