In Ukrainejust a few years ago, before the invasion of russiarefugees who arrived there were locked up in detention centers financed by the EU. In one of them, almost on the border with Belarus, the filmmaker Paula Palacios met Ali Ahmed Warsame when he was only fourteen years old. More than a decade later, the film My brother Ali It includes the friendship between them and Ali’s personal journey, from Somalia to an unexpected present, after passing through the US and after confirming the fallacy of the American dream.
History of encounter and recognition, of understanding and empathy, My brother Ali It is political and committed cinema that, from Ali’s life adventure, reveals the orphanhood of human beings who abandon their families and their homes and have to concentrate on surviving, at the same time looking for some other tribe to belong to and in which shelter
Present at Seminci’s Tiempo de Historia and at the Mexico Documentary Film Festival, the film earned its creator the IDA Award / NETFLIX to the Global Emerging Director by the International Documentary Association.
You have followed Ali halfway around the world for twelve years, but when did the idea of turning this relationship into a film come about?
At first it was much more an act of helping Ali, to help him get out of jail. When I met him briefly in Ukraine I was making a documentary about refugee women and I gave him my Facebook. And when I turn to Madridin the short time of the day when they allowed him to use his cell phone, he dedicated himself to watching the news, contacting his family and writing to me to convince me to go make a documentary about Somalia in jail. It was a time when Ukraine had become the wall of Europe. They held migrants in those detention centers that we financed from Europe.
Was this in 2011?
Yes. And in 2012 it was going to be the football euro cup in Ukraine and Polandand Ukraine had to have a good image. However, they were doing these things, putting migrants for twelve months in those centers, which is outrageous.
You have worked a lot on the issue of migration and Ali was not the only person who contacted you, what was so special about him?
Ali had something. It caught my attention that he was very informed about geopolitics. And I was very amused by a comment he made to me. We were in the middle of the Spanish economic crisis and he asked me what was happening with Bankia. He was daily in his messages and his perseverance and insistence made me think. All eyes were going to be on Ukraine for the UEFA And, it is true, there were many Somalis there… It was a cluster of people, because there were also Afghans, Syrians…, but they let them go. It’s this thing that you can be a refugee or a first-class migrant.
Was the first plan to do a story about Somali refugees?
Yes, the idea was to film him a little as the protagonist of a documentary about Somalia. And there were many things that for me at first were discarded, but it turned out that in a montage I realized that the subject of the documentary about the Somalis was not so interesting and what I did see was that there was something else much more personal and with more route. I think that’s when I started watching the movie.
You gave him a camera to record himself and he dedicated himself to recording you…
Yes and now I am a character in the movie, although there I still thought I would be a character off camera.
It is very interesting to see how Ali becomes much more involved with religion while in the US, while looking for a group to belong to.
Yes. I had a time when I didn’t really understand what was happening to him. Then, thinking about it a lot, I think he always had those roots. What happens is that at first you are busy solving your situation, you have other concerns. I believe that religion, and especially Islamallows you not to worry about religion while you have a problem. In the United States he is still settling, but there he has 600 dollars a month, they give him a house… and there the conflict between us and his radicalization began, when he had to take responsibility for himself and realizes what it costs to integrate. I think that the stress and knowing everything he had to do made him look for that community, anchor himself more to those roots that he already had and that it took me years to see. Ali didn’t interrupt my filming in Ukraine to go pray, but now it’s something he does. So I think his immersion in religion comes from the stress of having to integrate into a country that is not his own and the disappointment of american dream.
Does the film reflect how these human beings are treated in Europe and America?
Yes, I think it reflects well, above all, the restlessness that can generate in you believing that everything is going to be fine when no one is explaining to you that you are going to have a lot of problems. It’s something like what we tell young people about “if you want, you can.” This worries me a lot, because it is not true. Ali, to have a normal life in the US, had to give up things…
Ali is not a man who is particularly well liked. Does the film help to understand that you can understand people with ideas and convictions very different from your own?
Many people tell me that they see him as lazy and I am not going to say that he is not, because he does have a bit of laziness…
Do you mean that refugees are not allowed to have the defects of the rest?
And that’s also what it says Isabel Coixet that it seems like you have to make a documentary about a brilliant person. Because? Maybe he’s a normal guy with his things, that you like or dislike, but that doesn’t matter because who among us would want to have that life of waking up, working, studying…? none and why does he have to love her? Ali is like any of us, but he was born into a different situation. And despite everything, he is not a victim. But there are people who don’t like him and tell me that he has taken advantage of me. Well, and me about him, I’m making a movie.
What has this experience taught you?
It has taught me a lot of empathy and it has taught me to look as equals. I look at him as an equal, but so does he. Ali never saw me as the privileged one, he did ask me for things, but, as he says, I gave them to him and that’s why he asked me for more. He has taught me to position myself and treat him as a friend. He was the only one who went to see me, paying his own way, when I was in quarantine in Qatar. We have a real relationship, of telling each other things. Then, obviously, life separates us a little more and today there are deep conversations that I see I can’t have with him, but…
Has that connection you have with him limited you in any way in the film, has it self-censored in any way?
No, not the other way around, that is, I would have liked to tell more things, perhaps about his family and his origins, about the hardness he has experienced… but he has told me things from when he was little, things that have had a great impact on me, many years after we met. These are very difficult things that any of us would say at first to seem more like victims.
Has this film changed your way of understanding documentary film a little?
Well, it has taught me to be patient with stories, to dare to wait, to know when to start financing a film…
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