The Village Next to Paradise: Mo Harawe on his landmark Somali film and Cannes debut

Whenever he told people he was from Somalia, film director Mo Harawe says he “began to notice some patterns" about the sorts of images people had about the country.

Harawe tells Middle East Eye that it was these everyday encounters that spurred him to write what would become the first ever Somali film to compete at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024.

“Writing the script was completely intuitive,” he says, “it was all about simply writing different characters coming from different corners of actual daily life in Somalia.” 

With Cannes serving as a tastemaker for the whole film industry, the inclusion of Harawe’s film, The Village Next to Paradise, marks no small milestone, and has prompted a chorus of critical acclaim.

An extended festival run has tossed Harawe around four different continents and recently, to London, where the film had its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival in October. 

Again, this marked the first Somalia-set film in the festival’s history, despite Britain hosting the largest diasporic Somali population in Europe. 

For a country only now emerging onto the international film scene, countless appearances in western films have long cemented Somalia in the collective Western imagination. 

'The pirate movie'

In Ridley Scott’s blockbuster hit Black Hawk Down (2001), Somalia appears as a war-ravaged wasteland dominated by ruthless warlords, who are played by British actors. 

The film, shot entirely in Morocco, attracted criticism for airbrushing an alleged American war crime, and drew boycotts from Somali advocacy groups keen to note that zero Somali was spoken in the film. 

Future producers, however, were left undeterred – the 2021 South Korean film, Escape from Mogadishu, also shot in Morocco, likewise features no Somali actors. 

Meanwhile, the "Somali pirate movie" has emerged as a veritable genre-in-itself, propelled by the successes of the Danish festival favourite A Hijacking (2012) and the Oscar-nominated Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips (2013). 

“Although I don’t really watch these kinds of films anymore, I did have these in mind,” says Harawe, whose own film was shot using non-professional actors on location in rural Somalia.

“These stories are never from inside-out, which of course isn't only true for Somalia, but goes for the whole so-called 'Third World,' where you always have these kinds of narratives from the West - and recently, also from the East - about Africa generally.

"In Somalia I don’t think people care about these films, they have more important things to think about,” he continues. “But the people it does affect are the diaspora - like when I say I'm from Somalia, and someone replies saying 'Oh, the pirates!'” 

Opening with a clip from Britain’s Channel 4 News of an American missile strike on Somalia, The Village Next to Paradise taps directly into the issues surrounding images and representation. 

“The idea was to show what you see normally about Somalia in the western media. Whatever the topic is, when you see this kind of news, you don't really think about the people - in a way it’s just a form of entertainment. 

“So the idea was to show the real-life effects of what you see in the media - to show the other side in a human way, showing the people affected by what's happening around them. "

Indeed, The Village Next to Paradise is far from action-packed war movie fodder; it is a quiet, gentle film about human resilience and non-traditional family ties, in which armed conflict ripples in the background, just out of frame. 

Nonetheless, with Somalia still embroiled in an ongoing civil war that begun in 1991, the film doesn’t shy away from dealing with the everyday realities of a generation raised in armed conflict.

Its protagonist, Mamargade (Ahmed Ali Farah) works as a grave-digger, a grim metaphor for making do against a background of perpetual devastation. 

Harawe, 32, grew up in Somalia until he was almost 18, when he moved to Austria. While nothing in the film corresponds to actual biographical experiences of his own, Harawe says that “all the characters are amalgamations of different people that I know. The important thing was to show the spirit of the people.”

Growing up, Harawe watched plenty of films, even though many were in languages he says could hardly understand. During this time, though, he was “never thinking of making films - I didn't know that there were people behind the films making them. I didn’t see it as a job," he shrugs. 

He speaks as if he is a little bewildered as to how he has wound up making films, after arriving in Austria with little intention of heading into the industry and eventually struggling to get into film schools. 

“The only theory I have, in hindsight, is that maybe since I couldn’t speak the [German] language back then, film was a way to express myself, and so I identified myself with visual language - the universal language,” he says.

Avoiding tokenism

As with any landmark film from a nascent national film industry, The Village skirts a thin line between being hailed for its own merits and being pigeonholed as a Somali film, tokenistically displayed by liberal-minded film festivals in the West. 

Harawe is well-aware of this tension. “That's always there,” he says. “Somalia's an extreme case, but any film coming from the continent of Africa in general will always be seen as an 'African film'. 

“But making the film, I don't think in that way, and I don't put the film in a corner. That’s the reality of the film market. You just can't let it affect the way you make the film.”

'All the characters are amalgamations of different people that I know. The important thing was to show the spirit of the people'

- Mo Harawe, director

For Harawe, the rewards of achieving genuine cinematic representation for Somalia will always outweigh these tensions. 

“At the New Zealand International Film festival,” he says, “there was this Somali girl who came to me and told me that this was the first time she'd seen a film in the cinema where the language was Somali, and she didn't need to read the subtitles. 

“And she said, more than anyone else, she felt special in that moment because normally it was the opposite situation. So the reception's been really good.”

What’s surprised him more, he says, is the variety of reactions he’s received across different age-ranges within the Somali diaspora.

“Some people I met said they hadn't been to Somalia for 30 years because of the conflict there, and that the film gave them an idea of what it was like there. 

“Or there were some young people who told me that they understand their parents a little bit more now. Some people were just happy to see that people in Somalia don't see themselves as victims, as is always shown in the Western world - and that the country, actually, is beautiful.”

The film’s themes of strength, hope and courage emerge as a fitting parallel to its against-the-odds, trailblazing origin story. “I am always hopeful,” says Harawe.

“In Somalia, we've lived without a functioning system for thirty years now. The Somali people will always find a way to survive.”