Friday September 6, 2024
By Christopher Vourlias
Somali Canadian recording artist K’naan Warsame makes his feature directorial debut at the Toronto Film Festival with “Mother Mother,” which world premieres Sept. 6 in the festival’s Discovery section.
The film is set on a lonely farm in rural Somalia, where a widowed camel farmer, Qalifo (Maan Youssouf Ahmed), lives with her college-age son, Asad (Elmi Rashid Elmi). Raised in the shadow of his late father’s reputation for violence, Asad bristles at his mother’s strict parenting and escapes to a nearby village whenever he can.
But when he learns his girlfriend has been seeing a young American, Liban (Hassan Najib), their explosive confrontation seems as inevitable as the tragic consequences to follow. In the end, it’s left to Qalifo and Liban to somehow find common ground and heal their shattered community.
For his first feature, writer-director Warsame drew on a deeply emotional and traumatic episode from his childhood, when he was separated from his adopted brother as his family fled Somalia. Through a miraculous turn of events, his mother had managed to secure U.S. visas for the entire family, but money was scarce, and she couldn’t afford to buy plane tickets for everyone. The 13-year-old Warsame, along with his mother and two blood siblings, boarded the last commercial flight out of Mogadishu as the Somali government teetered on the brink of collapse. His adopted brother was left behind.
Looking back more than 30 years later, Warsame remembers it as a sliding-doors moment in his life, an event that marked the destiny of both the Grammy-winning singer and his adopted brother, who stayed behind as Somalia fell victim first to a civil war, then a bloody insurgency fueled by Islamist militants.
“It was the biggest question that hung over my life since leaving, whether I was willing to admit it or not, or deal with it or not,” he says. “I was too young at the time, having so many concerns about assimilating, figuring out who I am in this new world, but knowing what was animating much of my psychological desire to say something, to do something.”
Warsame describes “Mother Mother” as “an exercise in empathy,” revisiting the family’s flight through the eyes of the mother who had to make the impossible choice of who would go and who would stay behind. “I think a lot of cinema is that for me, or novels are that for me — just to inhabit someone else’s experience,” he says. “I’ve looked at the direct story in my own psyche for so long, and lived with it for so long, but [my mother] always stood out to me as having had the toughest lot.”
“Mother Mother,” which was produced by Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet for 25 Stories, along with Andrea Calderwood (“The Last King of Scotland”) for Potboiler Productions, was filmed in northern Kenya as well as the autonomous Somali region of Puntland. It was shot by Oscar-nominated “City of God” cinematographer César Charlone, with Warsame describing the experience as “a great exercise in community and working together.”
After emigrating to the U.S., the director and his family spent several months in New York before eventually settling in Toronto, where he would later launch his music career, releasing his acclaimed debut album “The Dusty Foot Philosopher.” As a recording artist, he achieved mainstream popularity before rising to international fame with his massive single “Wavin’ Flag,” which Coca-Cola selected as its official song for the 2010 World Cup, while also becoming a passionate ambassador for his fellow Somalis and refugees from all around the world.
K’Naan attends the Recording Academy’s 2024 Special Merit Awards Ceremony at Wilshire Ebell Theatre on February 03, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)
His storybook tale — so rare among the millions of others fleeing war, poverty, or other natural or manmade disasters — has left Warsame with a sense of indebtedness that’s pursued him throughout his career. “If you’re the one with the ticket, you can’t squander that,” he says. “And so a lot of a lot of my non-squandering turned toward art — toward telling stories about Somalis, about that immigrant experience, about what it’s like to leave.”
Earlier this year, the Recording Academy honored Warsame with the Best Song for Social Change Award for his 2023 single “Refugee,” a moving call to action for the world’s ongoing refugee crisis. The artist’s own experience as a refugee is something he frequently “touched on” in his music, he says, but often “not directly.” “A lot of that feeling of leaving someone behind, being wrenched from them, was present in my work. It’s not something that’s obvious for people, but it was always animating it,” he says.
In 2016, Warsame wrote and directed the pilot for “Mogadishu, Minnesota,” a family drama for HBO from executive producer Kathryn Bigelow set among the Somali community of Minneapolis. But the buzzy series — which grappled with the question of what it means to be an American — was a casualty of the politically charged climate in the run-up to that year’s contentious presidential election.
Warsame, who says he’s discussed several potential projects with U.S. networks, is ambivalent about whether the show would find a home on American TV today. “On the one hand, the industry seems to be more receptive, more ready, because they understand that there’s a demand. It’s not out of the goodness of their own hearts that they’re ready. It’s just that there’s a clear demand for stories that are not the same,” he says.
“The trouble is they also think they know, almost algorithmically, what those stories are. If someone has an identity that they call ‘underrepresented,’ then they know the kind of story that person should be telling,” he continues. “‘The kind of thing we’re ready for should look this kind of African. It should feel this kind of political.’ I don’t like the deliberate dictation of where my own tastes and styles should be, just because they are now ready for it.”
In the meantime, the singer-songwriter has been developing a musical for New York’s Public Theater since 2016, one that he jokingly says is still nowhere near completion. “Absolutely not,” he says, laughing. “But I’m so happy in it. It takes so long to make a musical. It’s like 30 songs in and still halfway there.”
Though it’s been more than a decade since he released his last studio album, Warsame continues to play at music festivals and live shows, saying those performances “still seem to really have a profound effect on the connection with people.”
“I love it,” he says. “I know that people come for the music they know, and that’s generally what we do. But I feel like if I’m convening people, I’m cheating them. ‘Who’s this guy with these same songs?’” He laughs. “So I really would like to just put some music out in order to justify my touring.”