Kaif Jama is currently shooting her first feature film. She dreams of one day releasing one of her films on Netflix. © Sofi Lundin
Even in a refugee camp, the Somali woman Kaif Jama liked to tell other children stories she had made up. The 25-year-old has now produced 66 short films and reopened a theater in Mogadishu for a premiere screening.
Kaif Jama was six years old when her mother fled the civil war in Somalia with her children in 1997. Her father had died and the mother had to get her six children safely across the border to Kenya. The family began their new life in the Kakuma refugee camp in the northwest of the country. But everyday life as a refugee was hard, which is why Kaif dreamed of other worlds: “As a child, I lived through the stories, they were like therapy for me,” says Kaif in an interview in Mogadishu.
She dreamed up fantasy stories and told them chapter by chapter to other refugee children. “My mother said I was going crazy, but I was obsessed with beautiful worlds. In my head, I was escaping reality,” she recalls. Soon the girl became a famous storyteller at the camp. Her geography teacher gave her an inspiration: “He always said I should write my stories down, but I was a lousy writer. When I was about 15 years old, he gave me the idea of making films. It was like a revelation for me,” says Kaif.
After several years in the Kakuma refugee camp, the family first moved to Uganda and then to Egypt. There, in 2017, Kaif shot her first short film with her friend, entitled It’s just a bad night, using her Canon camera. In it, Kaif plays a girl who can’t sleep. They uploaded the film to YouTube, and tens of thousands had clicked on it within a very short time.
Kaif’s short films contain hidden messages
Read HERE further on welt-sichten.org.
2023-07-06 22:06:30
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