The simple, sad tale of a single woman who has lost her life to online crowdfunding is retold in this gloomy age, when many Americans turn to online crowdfunding to fund potentially lifesaving healthcare. “The Gravedigger’s Wife”The film may not be as distant as it seems to Western viewers. The film charts the family’s desperate attempts to finance a life-saving kidney operation. This debut feature from Khadar Ayderus, a Finnish-Somali writer/director, captures the universality of social injustice and gives it enough cultural detail to make it stand out from other soapier dramas.
Thought “The Gravedigger’s Wife”The film is effectively a European production. It was co-financed in part by Germany, France, and Finland. It feels authentically integrated into the daily life in Djibouti’s poor outskirts, with its view free from condescension or exoticization. Neighboring Somalia, where Ahmed was born and raised, has entered it as its international Oscar submission, a further boost to the profile of a film already warmly received on this year’s festival circuit, beginning with a Cannes Critics’ Week premiere. Though the film’s modest scale and unassuming tone may work against its distribution prospects, it marks Ahmed — whose well-traveled short-film work includes a collaboration with “Compartment No. 6” director Juho Kuosmanen — as an assured, audience-minded storyteller to watch.
If anything, the storytelling in his freshman effort is polished to a fault: The film’s peril-infused second half works toward a climax of neatly schematic, O. Henry-style irony that feels less persuasive than the organic, vignette-based observation of what has gone before. The film’s first scenes, which are loosely sequenced, show Guled (Omar Abdi), an undemanding, resilient gravedigger who lives around his wife, Nasra, (Somali-Canadian model Yasmin Warsame), and her son Mahad, (Khadar Abdoul Aziz Ibrahim).
Together, Guled and Nasra want for little, and there’s a warm, charged intimacy to the scenes that capture them alone, whether sensually bathing, idly chatting or dressing to go out. Abdi and Warsame display the relaxed, coordinated body language a long-term couple who are tired of seduction but happy just being. Lately, however, his meager income has been swallowed entirely by antibiotics for Nasra’s chronic renal abscess, which has left her frail and bedridden. Worse still, the meds haven’t prevented the need for a $5,000 operation that they can’t remotely afford. Guled must confront his rural past and challenge local politics as they shut every door in their faces.
The cruelty of Guled’s livelihood depending on the deaths of others is repeatedly underlined, sometimes with an edge of morbid humor — as when a group of diggers quite literally chase an ambulance to the hospital entrance, tools in hand, hoping to claim dibs on any bodies within. “The Gravedigger’s Wife”It is implicitly condemning the systemic failures that make it necessary for such opportunism. A carrion economy that proves to be unsustainable when Guled needs the medical establishment in order to protect more lives than others. Gradually, however, Ahmed’s script sheds this subtly satirical streak in favor of a sentimentally cosmic view of life and death in balance — complete with heavily pointed cross-cutting — that’s less witty and more overtly heart-tugging.
The filmmaking and performances are elegantly restrained, even if the writing takes an overtly dramatic turn. Cinematographer Arttu Pelotaa contrasts urban clutter with sparse landscapes, often using turmeric yellows and parched browns. Sometimes characters are cast in isolation and left to drift in the frame. Other times, they are joined in tight, tactile close ups. It’s an alternating visual design that suits this film’s sympathy for the individual feeling abandoned in a society that nonetheless runs on human dependency. However, the system is a ladder and not a chain. Hovering in the dry air is the question of who, at the end of it all, digs the gravediggers’ graves.