Story Line
Somalia in the Picture presents the rich, past, present, and
future of Somalia cinema.
This interview-driven, verité, and visual-mosaic film presents still and moving images of the Somalia film industry’s achievements in documentary and feature film production, as well as of scenes in present-day Mogadishu and the remains of its once magnificent movie theatres. In interviews that accompany the images, Somali filmmakers and scholars recount a story that begins in the 1930s colonial period when worldwide demand for movies grew exponentially. Like audiences in the rest of the world, Somalis enjoyed films from Europe and Hollywood but also saw movies set in their own country. Italian directors were drawn to the country’s luminous landscape and the magnificent urban architecture in Mogadishu, the “White Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” as settings for their “empire” films, some of which were condemned—despite incorporation of Somali actors—for presenting Somalis as “docile” and subservient to the Fascist colonialist regime. In time, during the post-colonial period starting in 1960, Somalis began making their own movies, eventually hosting a Pan African film festival.
Among the country’s most prominent post-colonial films is the feature-length epic, The Somalia Dervishes (1985), a film whose origin, strangely, can be traced back to an American professor who received a large grant to make a documentary film set in the early 20th century about an anti-colonial Somali revolutionary. Two American filmmakers were enlisted to help make the documentary. Said Salah Ahmed, who at the time, was working in the Somalia Ministry of Education would be their translator. With the development of the film, he quickly became indispensable in shaping its story as he evolved into his roles as co-writer and co-director. Salah Ahmed’s interviews are the central thread in Somalia in the Picture’s progressively revelatory narrative structure, as he explains the making of The Somalia Dervishes, its destruction with rest of the Somali Film Agency’s entire archive at the beginning of the civil war (1991), and his nearly thirty-five-year search for the film’s improbable survival.
Somalia in the Picture uses Salah Ahmed’s journey to drive a story that explores and showcases the almost ninety years of Somalia’s obscured, and in some cases obliterated, cinematic achievements. The film achieves this by incorporating a series of insightful interviews, providing viewers with a nuanced glimpse into the world of diaspora Somali directors. Among them are individuals have fled their war-torn country, some of whom have returned to work in Somalia, and some of whom have contributed their unique vision of filmmaking in their new adopted home countries. Over the years, this young generation of filmmakers has emerged and proven, through their own artistic resilience, that war cannot erase culture. It will be their stories, talent, and determination that extends the long list of Somali contributions in the world of cinema.
