K’naan on the Inspiration Behind His Directorial Debut ‘Mother Mother’

To delay the inevitable

That energy has been transferred to the world of filmmaking. K’naan has loved cinema ever since his childhood years in Mogadishu. “In fact, there’s a musical that I’ve been working on at the public theater here in New York, and it’s about my love of cinema. My sneaking into movie theaters as an 8-year-old began in Somalia. I am someone who would go to the movie theater here in New York before [COVID-19], it was four times a week for a decade. I do love movies,” he says.

That admiration has led to him writing and directing his first feature film, Mother Mother. It tells the story of a mother who loses her son and finds herself in a position to decide the fate of her son’s killer. 'Mother Mother' will screen from September 6 through 13 at Toronto International Film Festival 2024 which begins on September 5.

“The story is pretty recent because it came about as a scenario where my aunt was dying in 2020,” K’naan says. “My mother [and her other] sister, whose name was Qalifo, found out that my aunt was dying and [while] there [wasn’t] really much we could do, there was a way we could prolong her life by surgeries in different countries.”

K’naan’s aunt was not having it; she saw no reason to delay the inevitable. K’naan’s mother was more amenable to the idea. Since there was a deadlock, the matriarchs deferred to K’naan to make the final decision.

“That’s where my first inclination for this story came from. It was from thinking about, ‘How do I put a challenge on her as excruciatingly as she put it on me?’”

K’naan started writing the story in October 2020, and principal production started in September 2023. Our conversation happened a few days after the final cut was delivered. The film was made primarily in Northern Kenya, and features some parts of Somalia.

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Regarding his experience on-set, K’naan says that he learned a lot, and that the craft didn’t feel like it was outside of his toolbox. “It was about telling a story, and convening a group of people to believe in that same story and to work towards it. It’s something that I know [how to do] as a storyteller. But then I also had a lot of help and a lot of incredible collaborators. So I feel fortunate for that as well.”

The collaborative process

K’naan tells us that he’s particular about any and everything. That is because he knows down to the dot what he wants things to feel like. “I was trying to conjure up how to communicate that to a mass amount of people. But I think my closest collaborators — my cinematographer, my producers, my assistant director, the production designer — were in my corner, and I was talking to them two years before we even began shooting. All the time seeing movies together. I think a close collaboration, for me, helps the whole process.”

For casting, they turned to the expertise of Alexa Flogel, who has done casting for shows such as Oz and The Wire. “What I liked about her, what I wanted was that she was good at picking out people who we don’t know yet, who have potentially strong qualities as actors.”

The casting process wasn’t easy; K’naan was adamant that they should be Somali speakers. The lead, Maan Youssouf Ahmed, is a woman of Somali origin who resides in Nairobi. Other cast members were from Mogadishu, Somalia and the U.K.

“Our lead has never been in front of a camera before,” K’naan says. “She is phenomenal in this movie. I think people will be very surprised that someone who is that strong of an actress has not been an actor before.”

The pacing is excellent, the acting carries the film along, but it’s really the writing that takes the prize. For instance, when the widowed Qalifo, who has just lost her son, is asked about the fate of the killer, she responds by saying that she doesn’t want him dead, but instead wants him around so that he can do all the duties her son used to assist her with.

“I think, for me, what inspired that was more the idea that ‘how do we live with things we cannot change?’ The idea that a young man kills is not new. What I was interested in is how the person who is left behind has to live almost for two. They now have to live with that burden, the absence of that person,” he says.

The editorial decisions are also impressive. We don’t, for example, get to see the murder happening, only the after-effects. K’naan concludes by telling us about the on-set challenges. The plan was to film on barren land, but the weather had other ideas. “The area got a torrential downpour, more than they’ve had in many years, almost every day. Everything was green. And of course, we were very happy for those people, who prayed and got the rain. But it messed up my movie,” he says, jokingly.