TIFF 2024 premiere film 'Mother Mother' offers an intimate portrait of motherhood, grief and forgiveness

First-time filmmaker Somali-Canadian writer/director K’naan Warsame's film is replete with unique vocals that focuses on themes of death, mourning while opening a window to the world of the Somali pastoralists.

The film covers universal human emotions including a mother's love, a young man's romantic love and dreams, justice and punishment, and revenge and forgiveness.relaying the message of self acceptance, the rejection of ‘normal’ society, and the importance of mental health.

In rural Somalia's lonely farm, the widowed Qalifo (Maan Youssouf Ahmed) and her college-age son Asad (Elmi Rashid Elmi) raise camels. Living in the shadow of his late father’s violent reputation and amid Qalifo’s strict parenting, Asad finds solace by escaping to a nearby village whenever he can.

A moral drama is portrayed in a very small world juxtaposed against Somali culture with its beliefs, where Qalifo and her son Asad raise camels. Asad's sense of alienation comes from being raised by an overprotective single mother, who lost her husband, Asad's father, in World War II.

When Asad learns his girlfriend has been seeing another boy, the American visitor Liban (Hassan Najib), a confrontation follows resulting in the death of Asad. After learning of  Asad’s death the tribe’s elders give Qalifo three choices for retribution, money, land, or ordering the boy’s death.

When Qalifo instead decides to have Liban, sentenced to live on her land, as her son, the conception of justice and enforcement of its customs where communities make collaborative decisions becomes inevitable.

The story emerges to a tender and even delicate story about two very different people, with neither of them knowing the language of the other.

With a lay out of a tangled narrative of complicated lives with emotional choices, and hard-won understanding by Warsame, his love for music is visible by the background music with many other popular musicians.

Warsame has crafted a touching story giving the audience a slice of everyday life in a rural area with its clearly laid out community structure both understandable, and relatable. 

He focuses on not only  widowed Qualifo's strength for her hard work each day whilst grieving her beloved husband but also her weakness compelling her to want to hang on to her son forever to ward off loneliness due to her own insecurity caused by her past trauma.

The film is beautifully shot by César Charlone in the Somali camel-herding regions. From the first frame, through the magic and skill of filmmaking, the audience is transported to a distant land to connect with a familiar subject.

Mother Mother is the recipient of this year's FIPRESCI AWARD,  dedicated to emerging filmmakers, to a debut feature film having its World Premiere in TIFF’s Discovery programme.

“Mother Mother'..depicts a humanistic approach towards a revenge narrative set in a country haunted by violence and grief...in its non-sensationalist treatment of contentious politics through its parallels of the human and the natural world. Warsame’s feature debut, through its compelling formal attributes and charismatic acting, conveys a sense of hope and healing after tragedy,” a FIPRESCI Jury statement has said.

Winner of many awards, including a Grammy, a VMA, and four Juno awards, K’naan Warsame has written and produced episodes of the TV series Castle Rock (18) and Extrapolations (23). Mother Mother (24) is his directorial debut.

(Reporting by Suman Das with Asha Bajaj)