Director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed Discusses Critically Acclaimed ‘The Gravedigger’s Wife’
DUBAI: Khadar Ayderus Ahmed was at his nephew’s funeral when he came up with the idea. In the aftermath of that tragedy, the Finnish-Somali director had spent a tortuous week between hospitals and cemeteries, searching for imams in Finland who could put his young love to rest.
As they said their last goodbyes, Ahmed’s brother reminded him how different things had been in Somalia when they were children, where gravediggers sit day and night outside the hospital, ready to do the job at a moment’s notice. It’s an image that he kept thinking about that night as he went to sleep, and it’s an image that he quickly turned into a script titled “The Gravedigger’s Wife.”
“That character would not leave me alone,” Ahmed tells Arab News. “At home, at work, that character was in my head, helping me tell his story. I couldn’t get it out until I locked myself in a room, didn’t talk to anyone, and came back two weeks later with the full first draft.”
10 years later, Ahmed’s exciting project, shot entirely in Djibouti, has made history. The film, which has received rave reviews since its Cannes debut, has just become the first Somali-language feature film to gain a world premiere, and has already become the first Somali film submitted to the Academy Awards.
Khadar Ahmed (C) and lead actress Yasmine Warsame (R) on the set of ‘The Gravedigger’s Wife’. (Lasse Lecklin)
It is a humbling moment for Ahmed, who silently wonders how a refugee in Finland is the first Somali to blaze that trail, despite a Somali diaspora of two million people scattered around the world, mostly in countries seemingly with a lot more opportunities for aspiring storytellers. than the small Nordic nation in which he and his family settled when he was 16 years old.
“I think in a way, everything happened for a reason. It is a great blessing,” says Ahmed.
He believes he owes his voice as a filmmaker to both his home country and his adopted country.
“I grew up in a nation of storytellers, full of oral storytellers and poets. Since I heard so many tell their stories, I started making up my own for my friends, creating intricate fantasies in my head. The first movies I was introduced to were Bollywood movies that were shown on TV without subtitles or dubbing. I would sit there for seven hours a day not understanding what was being said, but absorbing a lot of the images, creating the story in my head and telling it to my friends later,” says Ahmed.
Khadar Ahmed on the set of ‘The Gravedigger’s Wife’. (Lasse Lecklin)
Being 16 years old is hard enough, managing the often overwhelming transition into adulthood. To do that as a refugee in a foreign nation, to go from “Africa, where everything is colorful and loud and crazy, to a small town in the North Atlantic that was so distant and so quiet and so cold and so white, it was a great culture. shock,” says Ahmed.
“I felt a real emptiness moving from Africa to Europe, I had left everything behind. I didn’t know what to do, so I took refuge in the movies. I would go early in the morning where there were only a few elderly people, I would watch a giant screen and immerse myself in a different world for an hour and a half. That was my way of filling the void,” he continues.
Ahmed knew he wanted to be a storyteller, but for years he thought that meant becoming a writer. And although he managed to get the films he wrote made, he was not satisfied with the way Finnish directors interpreted his work.
“It made me feel really bad. I was witnessing my scripts being destroyed before my eyes. You don’t know if someone is going to understand you, and that became especially clear to me with ‘The Gravedigger’s Woman’. A white Finnish director could never tell this story like a Somali would, because it would be from an outsider’s perspective. I knew then that I had to direct my own film,” he explains.
Over the next few years, Ahmed trained as a director, directing a series of short films before he was finally able to make “The Gravedigger’s Wife,” a screenplay he completed in 2012. In the meantime, he had assembled a team of trusted collaborators who were willing to Following him from Finland to the Horn of Africa, he and the crew arrived in Djibouti just a month before the start of filming, and with only two confirmed cast members. Since the country has no film infrastructure to speak of, there was no casting director he could call.
“I had no choice but to go out on the street and chase people, literally. Luckily, I had a good friend with me, Fardouza (Moussa Egueh), a local woman who ended up playing a doctor in the film. I couldn’t just approach a woman on the streets, for her to approach them on my behalf. The men I would approach myself,” says Ahmed.
Khadar Ahmed on the set of ‘The Gravedigger’s Wife’. (Lasse Lecklin)
“We found almost (the entire cast) on the streets or in the mall. A girl was a cashier at the supermarket near the hotel where we were staying. I couldn’t give some of them the script because some of them only read and write in French. I had to stay so confident and lean on the expertise of my team to get all of these people to believe, understand and execute on our vision,” she continues.
This somewhat clunky method of casting really paid dividends. Ahmed says that he was also inspired by his group of first-time actors. In one of the film’s best moments, a gravedigger tells a joke to the others, a fable about a group of rats wondering how they could protect themselves from a local cat. The cunning rat says that they could put a bell on the cat, and the other rats agree. Then the most “stupid” rat ruins everything by asking, who is going to bell the cat? It’s a story that came entirely from the actor himself on set, and Ahmed marvels at how well it fits with the film’s themes.
Behind the scenes on the set of ‘The Gravedigger’s Wife’. (Lasse Lecklin)
“Ultimately, this movie is about the lengths a man will go to in order to save the one he loves; in this case, a gravedigger who saves his wife, even if he knows it means sacrificing his own safety to do so. And while that could be heavy and dark and depressing, I wanted it to feel like a fable and full of humor and irony and heart, like that joke,” says Ahmed.
As “The Gravedigger’s Wife” resonates with audiences around the world, Ahmed is pleased to have found his voice as a storyteller, both on the page and behind the camera, and is set to release his next film, a short film titled “Night Stop”—in competition at the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah next month, before embarking on his next feature film, a comedy set in Africa.
“In everything, I will continue to tackle heavy and difficult topics, but I want my films to continue to have a little bit of everything: humor, intimacy, love, adventure and action,” he says. “It’s what we go through on a daily basis, and that should be portrayed in one shot on screen, just as it is in life.”
Source: news.google.com