The Gravedigger’s Wife: a significant new entry in the nascent Somali cinema

• This review contains spoilers.

Having lived in Finland since his teens, 41-year-old Somali director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed returned to his homeland to make his debut feature, The Gravedigger’s Wife, about a gravedigger and his family living in abject poverty. In other hands, such a project might have descended into misery tourism, but there’s enough flair, grace, fine acting and solid direction in this movie to make it a significant entry in the nascent Somali cinema.

Somalia was once a market for films exported from former colonial powers (Italy, the UK), as well as from new political allies (the Soviet Union, East Germany), but a long period of political turmoil, armed conflict and suicide bombing has brought enormous interruption to Somali film culture. Last year Somalia saw its first theatrical movie screening in 30 years; also last year, The Gravedigger’s Wife premiered at Cannes.

Ahmed’s film, which charts the titular gravedigger’s return to his home village to raise money for an operation that will save his wife’s life, pays equal respect to African and Western storytelling traditions. The oral culture of the former is foregrounded in a sequence that uses parallel narratives: we see the gravedigger Guled (Omar Abdi) telling a story to a group of nomads, before the film cuts to his wife Nasra (Yasmin Warsame) telling the same story to their son. But the film deliberately forgoes dramatic situations, often eliding the potential climax of a scene. Moments of resolution are almost never shown but are rather postponed, being referred to indirectly in following scene – when, often with a tinge of suspense, only the impact of the previous action is seen. Ahmed treats situations in an understated way and avoids the sort of ironic contrasts popular in many African films since the early work of Djibril Diop Mambéty.

Although the film leaves certain decisive moments out of the frame, prominence is given to spaces at the edge of the city, not least the shanty towns. Reflecting both the European sensibilities of the director and crew, as well as Ahmed’s connection to his African heritage, the film’s reverent look aestheticises a people bent under hardship. But if the interior of a shack is as neatly lit as if it were a conventional apartment (the work of Finnish cinematographer Arttu Peltomaa), there seems to be a logic at work: a stylistic decision to attribute a particular elegance to both places and people (Warsame is a Canadian model of Somali origins). This is a film that aims to acknowledge the dignity of a nation through pictorial beauty.

The combination of narrative strategy, visual style and African cinematic tradition is most cogently expressed in the film’s central idea of journeying, and in the urgency of movement. Early on, Guled is seen sitting listless outside a hospital waiting for the next unclaimed body to bury. Once Nasra becomes gravely ill, however, the way he looks at the shrouded bodies changes. The need for money for his wife’s operation spurs Guled to return to the village he once abandoned in favour of the city. Along the way, his journey becomes increasingly metaphorical: he borrows a pair of women’s shoes after losing his own footwear, eventually going barefoot. There is also a touch of the western genre, when vultures start buzzing around and dry ominous trees appear along the trail – reminiscent of the hard-nosed cinema of Budd Boetticher. The visually arresting natural landscape has the same brutality as the slums, a brutality that comes to the fore in the indifference Guled faces.

In fact, western elements first appear before Guled’s journey begins. In a scene set in an abandoned train station, young boys in cardboard cowboy hats play a war game as Guled says farewell to his son. There is a clash here between the immobile, rusty wagons and Guled’s urge to leave. Soon the sound of a moving train is heard in the distance. This call to movement provides the only way out of the purgatory in which Guled exists.

When Guled is violently rejected by the village – essentially punished for abandoning his way of life – the film establishes a link between movement and survival, something the director himself, the son of a refugee family, evidently sees as the very affirmation of life. At the end, Guled’s badly beaten body, barely alive, is seen being taken away in a pick-up truck. No longer able to walk, the gravedigger is nonetheless travelling forward, as if he were asking: “to move or not to move?”

► The Gravedigger’s Wife is in UK cinemas from tomorrow.