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 "I only have two lines," the
character - whose name, Ayaanle, is also the
film's title - complains bitterly. "'I kill you'
and 'Allahu Akbar'."
The new 90-minute film, due for release in
February, follows the success of The
Gravedigger's Wife, by a Finnish-Somali
director, and the first film screening for three
decades in Somalia's war-ravaged capital
Mogadishu. The newly refurbished National
Theatre showed Ayaanle's trailer this week.
The story is set Nairobi's suburb of Eastleigh,
home to many Somali families. Ayaanle is played
by Somali-American actor Barkhad Abdirahman, who
was in Academy Award-nominated films "Captain
Philips" alongside Tom Hanks, and "Watu Wote"
made in Kenya.
As the story begins, Ayaanle finds the American
accent he has cultivated means he's charged more
in the routine shakedowns from cops in his
neighbourhood - they think he's been living
abroad so he must have money.
To recoup the bribe, he impersonates a member of
Somalia's al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab insurgency
to scam $500 from a gullible Western journalist.
But police recognise his TV interview and he
becomes entangled with an elite anti-terrorism
unit whose banter is as slick as their suits.
Somali-Dutch director Ahmed Farah wrote the
movie based on scams he saw while working as a
news cameraman for networks like Al Jazeera and
Britain's Channel Four. He says a few Eastleigh
residents routinely impersonated pirates for
reporters.
"I heard a lot of interesting stories – stories
that you hear when the camera is off," said
43-year-old Farah, who used to shoot videos for
MTV.
Farah said it took him eight years to write,
finance and shoot the film, which at times was
such a strain that his blood pressure rocketed
and he fainted.
With funding from Somali businessmen and other
donors, shooting finally began in November 2019
but Farah soon ran out of cash. Work on the film
briefly resumed in 2020 until Kenya went into
lockdown due to COVID-19.
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 When they could finally restart
eight months later, Abdirahman broke his rib in
an accident, and other actors showed up looking
different after months of lockdown, sporting new
hairstyles or having put on weight.
But there were upsides too: the Eastleigh
community rallied around the film, donating
refreshments, or homes to use as sets. The
police offered cars, unloaded guns, and set
security.
They let Farah into the local jail so he could
build a replica set - memorably portrayed when a
community elder gets propositioned by a
sequin-clad sex worker when trying to bail out
Ayaanle.
Most of the crew and actors had experienced the
kind of police harassment shown in the film,
Abdirahman said, and many were nervous about
publicly acting like terrorists - especially
when police were around.
"They said 'If those cops have our pictures
later when this film is done they will come and
interrogate us and put us in jail' - the same
situation the main character Ayaanle went
through," Abdiraman told Reuters.
Farah said that's why he's so excited by the
blossoming of Somali cinema - and the chance to
show more than pirates, refugees, militants and
war.
"We can always complain that the world is not
telling the real stories of Somalia but its us
who needs to tell the stories," he said. "We
need to tell our stories not just to the world
but to ourselves."
(Reporting by Katharine Houreld; Editing by
Raissa Kasolowsky)
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