Finnish Somali filmmaker Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, whose debut feature “The Gravedigger’s Wife” premiered at Cannes’ Critics’ Week in 2021, is developing his follow-up, “Thundering Smoke,” which follows a middle-aged Somali hitwoman who returns to her village to seek vengeance against a ruthless crime boss.
Ahmed will be presenting the project at Finnish Film Affair, an annual industry event running parallel to the Helsinki Intl. Film Festival – Love & Anarchy, which takes place Sept. 24 – 26.
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“Thundering Smoke” is set in a Somali village where Barni, a mysterious hitwoman in her fifties, dramatically resurfaces years after vanishing without a trace. There she is intent on getting revenge on a vicious gangster, Ardo, who rules the village with an iron fist.
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One fateful night, a young bus conductor witnesses a deadly sword fight between Barni and members of Ardo’s murderous gang. Driven by an insatiable curiosity about the mysterious older woman, he sets out on a secret mission to track her down and discover her true identity — a search that will set him on a perilous course.
Written and directed by Ahmed, “Thundering Smoke” is produced by Sébastien Onomo for French production outfit Special Touch Studios, in co-production with Minna Haapkylä for Helsinki-based Rabbit Films, Adrien Chef of Luxembourg-based production and sales company Paul Thiltges Distributions, Elisa Fernanda Pirir of Norway’s STÆR and Canadian production house Périphéria Productions.
Speaking to Variety ahead of Finnish Film Affair, Ahmed described his second feature as a “much more ambitious film” than his acclaimed debut, calling it an attempt to “really push the boundaries [and] see how far I can go as a filmmaker.”
“It’s really a cross-genre film that blends fantasy, romance, suspense, drama. There are a lot of samurai elements,” he said. “It follows an emotional journey of these two lonely souls from two different worlds, two different generations — a young boy who’s experiencing love for the first time, and this older woman who has long given up on love — and the unexpected bond they form.”
The director noted the parallels between his two films, which he envisions as part of a trilogy “about the lengths that people can go for the people they love,” though with his latest effort, “the approach is completely different” from “The Gravedigger’s Wife.”
With the partners for the ambitious five-country co-production already in place, Ahmed hopes to begin location scouting in East Africa later this year.
Born in Mogadishu, Ahmed left Somalia as a teenager and has spent most of his adult life in Helsinki, where he cut his teeth as a filmmaker. After writing and directing a series of well-traveled shorts — including a collaboration with Finnish compatriot and “Compartment No. 6” director Juho Kuosmanen — he made his feature directorial debut with “The Gravedigger’s Wife.”
The film, which tells the story of a poverty-stricken family in Djibouti desperately trying to fund a kidney operation, enjoyed a strong festival run after bowing in Critics’ Week to wide acclaim and opened that year’s Finnish Film Affair. Variety’s Guy Lodge described it as a “plaintively moving debut feature” that “identifies a universal strain of social injustice, but presents it with enough grainy cultural specificity to stand out from other, soapier dramas on the subject.” The film was Somalia’s submission for the best international feature Academy Award.
While “The Gravedigger’s Wife” was an unexpected breakout from the Horn of Africa — a region with a small cinematic footprint on the global stage — perhaps no one was as shocked by the movie’s runaway success as Ahmed. “At the time, I didn’t even know if I wanted to direct — I just wanted to be a screenwriter,” he said. Before long, however, he recognized that he “might never find somebody that can tell this story the way I want to tell it.”
The movie not only marked Ahmed’s debut as a feature film director, but his first filmmaking venture in Africa, after shooting his previous shorts in Finland. The experience was something of a revelation for the 44-year-old, who admits that it was only “later in my life that I discovered African cinema.”
“I really fell in love with [African films]. I related more to them than to Hollywood or Bollywood films,” he said, citing pioneering filmmakers such as Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty, Chad’s Mahamat-Saleh Haroun and Mauritanian Malian director Abderrahmane Sissako. “That was how my relationship, my desire to make films in Africa started.”
That love affair has only deepened with time — and his own experiences behind the camera.
“Once we arrived in Djibouti and started shooting [‘The Gravedigger’s Wife’], I fell in love even more, simply because of all the possibilities the country offered to us as filmmakers,” he said. “The colors, the sun. You just turn around, and it’s a completely different landscape.”
It took only 21 days to shoot his debut, and while the budget of “Thundering Smoke” will allow Ahmed to work on a larger scale, Africa alone seems capable of offering a canvas broad enough for the director’s vision. “It’s just endless possibilities,” he said.
