« What was important to me was that the characters carry in them the spirit of the people of Somalia » – Liberation

The filmmaker Mo Harawe, born in 1992, grew up in Mogadishu before studying cinema in Austria. His very beautiful first feature film, the village at the gates of paradise, which will remain (also) in history Like the first Somali film shown at the Cannes Film Festivalshot in villages traveled by the wind of the desert, tells both daily and picaresque adventures of three characters forming a kind of family. There is a language of cinema where plastic beauty serves the alliance between a real fantasy and the desire to do justice to the real life of places that are never filmed.

You cannot detach the gaze of your film, the visual invention work is captivating. Can you talk about this care given to the image?

The visual aspect of course arises from lots of different elements, people and filmed places, frames, colors. We started from what we didn’t want rather than what we wanted. We especially did not want the stereotypical color of these films shot in Africa or South America where the image is very yellow to materialize the heat. We decided that there would not be this yellow but that we would take everything else, letting the other colors express themselves. They were there. We were held to what was before our eyes, in