But for all its flaws, Daydreamers is a film made on the premise that the Somali story is substantially untold and profoundly undocumented, and that is just enough to carry the motion picture.
By Frank Njugi
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Somalis make up 54% (more than 280,000) of the refugee population in Kenya. Over 100,000 of them reside in Nairobi, mostly inhabiting the mixed-use neighbourhood of Eastleigh. They have formed an enclave that has seen the locals call the area Little Mogadishu, with the place now viewed as a dislocated proxy seat of the government of Somalia — a country known to be disintegrated.
Eastleigh is home to a booming Somali trade, huge shopping malls, Matwana culture, and most of all, daydreamers, Somalis who consider the place as only a temporary stop on their journey to first-world countries. The latest East African film to come to Netflix tells the story of these dreamers – or Bufis are they are known in Somali. The titular Daydreamers is the handiwork of Kenyan-based Italian filmmaker, Vincenzo Cavallo, who is the founder of the Cultural Video Production, and co-founder of The Nrb Bus Collective. He directs the film alongside Somali actor, Mahad Ahmed.
The main protagonist in Daydreamers is Assad, portrayed by Ilmi Ahmed, a man who orchestrates the journey of countless Somalis – Bufis – from Eastleigh to the USA, all through illegal means. Using his Nairobi to Minnesota cargo delivery company as a cover, he operates a visa scam business with the aid of Kamal, portrayed by Ali Buul, a Mogadishu-born Somali who lived in Minneapolis–Saint Paul for twenty years before being repatriated to Eastleigh due to criminal gang affiliations. In Eastleigh, Kamal forms his own gang, made up of hoodlum-repatriated Somalis to assist with his criminal activities.
Assad and Kamal’s visa scam is based on the real-life United States Diversity Visa scam prevalent in Nairobi between the late 90s and early 2010s. In the film, the two help Somalis who dream of leaving Eastleigh, training them on how to act as members of a fictitious family that would scam the United States Embassy during their visa application. The majority of the film follows a set of prospective immigrants being coached on how to cheat the American immigration system. During their training process, we get to dive into their unique and contrasting life stories and histories, one that exposes the realities of Somalis striving to belong in a country where the local authorities use phrases such as ‘less Somalis, less problems’ to refer to them.
While speaking on the film at Kofisi Africa’s Kofisi Konnect podcast, Cavallo spoke of how the film was inspired by the need to tell the migration story from a different perspective. For a long time, the story of refugees had been told from a lens of where they are portrayed as victims of the immigration system, but for a period, Somalis found a way to overcome and were able to swindle this system. Through Assad, Cavallo achieves this. The director weaves the protagonist into a person who finds an avenue to overcome the barriers of visa restrictions through a compelling script about families fleeing conflict — blending fiction with facts from his own troubled history. While Ahmed’s acting seems far from seamless, Assad’s characterisation is elegant, even as some of the other characters rob it of its majesty.
In the film’s most intriguing scene, Assad teaches the fictitious family Stanislavski’s system of acting which they are to employ in front of the US embassy officials. As they experience feelings analogous to those of the characters Assad has created in his script, we witness an eerie unexpected narration of baneful Somali experiences. Through the fictitious grandfather, we get a brief view of how militia groups have historically been a defining feature of Somalia’s conflict landscape, and through the fictitious daughter, the dangers that Somali refugees face while trying to cross the border from Somalia into Dadaab, Kenya are brought to light. Through the fictitious mother, the experiences of Somali women at the hands of the Al-Shaabab are revealed, and through the fictitious father, the constructs of survival in a Somali refugee camp are shown.
Kamal, as the co-protagonist, is a portrayal of elegant fury — always on the move with a feline fluidity, striving to help his fellow Somalis get what he lost when he was deported. He doubles up as the film’s narrator, with his off-stage commentary reminiscent of that of a film noir, and the ironic counterpoints he throws on occasion become the more thrilling aspect of the film. Buul embodies the character well; the delivery of his lines has a certain prose-poetic feel to them, but on occasion, his exquisite portrayal of Kamal isn’t enough to bring pizzazz to some of the poxy scenes he is dealt with. The cringiest scene I have ever seen in a film comes around 30 minutes into Daydreamer’s 102-minute runtime, where Kamal is in a club guzzling alcohol for unclear reasons as he flirtatiously dances with a Somali girl whose accent intermittently and awkwardly changes from a Somali to Kenyan.
But for all its flaws, Daydreamers is a film made on the premise that the Somali story is substantially untold and profoundly undocumented, and that is just enough to carry the motion picture. Somali playwright and poet, Said Salah Ahmed, once said, “Somalia’s history is filled with stories of triumph and tragedy, which subsequently creates a resilient and resolute people.” Daydreamers — whose production was made possible by the Berlinale World Cinema Fund and the Red Sea Film Fund — serves as evidence of how film, as a medium of storytelling that uses visual aesthetics, can be used to tell the stories of the resilient Somali people. Daydreamers may not be your typical stellarly-made film, but it sure might be the beginning of much-needed commentary on the lives and experiences of Somalis.
Rating: 2/5
(Daydreamers is currently streaming on Netflix)
Frank Njugi is a Kenyan Writer, Culture journalist and Critic who has written on the Kenyan and East African culture scene for platforms such as Debunk Media, Sinema Focus, Culture Africa, Wakilisha Africa, The Moveee, Africa in Dialogue, Afrocritik and others. He tweets as @franknjugi