Muna
2023 · 19m · United Kingdom
Directed by Warda Mohamed
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A British-Somali teenager desperate to join her school trip must navigate a confusing mourning period when her grandfather dies in Somalia - a family member she never met.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent and emotionally honest, but grief-and-identity-crisis-via-diaspora is exactly the coming-of-age beat everyone's making right now—Mohamed doesn't really subvert the form, just executes it well.
A precisely calibrated chamber piece in the tradition of tender family dramas; the restraint in the staging and the careful temporal architecture of the mourning period show a director who understands how cinema holds space for contradiction.
Mohamed makes the crucial choice to keep the grandfather absent—never showing him, barely naming him—which transforms what could've been a sentimental reconciliation into something about the actual texture of grief and distance, and that absence does all the work.
Festivals
- American Black Film Festival 2024, Official Selection
- Berlinale 2024, Generation 14plus - International Premiere
- Raindance Film Festival 2023, World Premiere
- British Independent Film Awards 2023, Nominated, Best British Short