by Conrad Heine
Amina, which had its London premiere during Somali Week in October thanks to the Almas Art Foundation, is the feature film debut of Ahmed Abdullahi, an up-and-coming Swedish screenwriter and director born in Somalia, with a background in short films and documentaries.
He opens his full-length career with this powerful cinematic portrait of a young female Somali- Swedish MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter battling against the odds. Amina is a young, talented MMA fighter striving to get back to her passion while struggling to raise her daughter.
When Amina gets a chance to train with one of the top coaches, living up to expectations of her as a fighter becomes increasingly difficult. Her relationship with her daughter suffers, and Amina has to make a choice: will she become a successful fighter or the mother that’s expected of her?
While Amina in some ways follows a typical plot trajectory (all the way to its ending as uncertain as the life it portrays), it has profound impact, is never heavy-handed, and is truly moving. The MMA scenes are brutal (almost too much for me), so be prepared. But in between bouts, one finds oneself rooting for Amina, as she struggles to follow her path against the pressures of family, parenthood and simple daily economics.
Nimco Ahmed Ali’s performance really captures her depths – she is a spiky, far from sympathetic character, whose impulses ensure she is partly the author of her own misfortunes, and savage in (and out of) the ring. But at the same time, her vulnerabilities, her internal battles, her love for her daughter, and her fears are clear.
Abdullahi employs sparingly a drowning metaphor to capture her struggles, and speaking with him after the screening, his sincerity and commitment to knowing what he didn’t know in order to make the story ring true really shone through. As an effective portrayal of lives in the Somali community in Sweden (and anywhere out of the Horn, really), Amina is likely to be very hard to beat..
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