Immigrant lives have been the stuff of some of the best of global cinema in recent times, touching upon themes of identity, home and belonging, and focusing on the struggles to start lives afresh as refugees in alien lands. The many efforts that go into building things from scratch.
In her debut feature film, Nomad Shadow, Eimi Imanishi looks at things from the flip side. What is it like to be forced to return to the home, family and friends that you had left far behind? Can you fit right back in? Will those you left behind take you back in their fold? How does it feel to have to be uprooted from the new home and newfound family and friends?
Nomad Shadow tries to capture it through the young Sahrawi protagonist, Mariam (Nadhira Mohamed) who is deported from Spain back to Western Sahara/Morocco only to find herself confronting an overwhelming sense of emotional exile at home, in a country in the throes turbulence itself, facing drought, shortages and political protests.
In its short run-time, the 82-minute Arabic-Spanish film, doesn’t just give us a peep into Mariam’s struggles to readjust in the country and culture that she can no longer relate to, especially when it comes to gender roles, but it also dwells on the familial grudges that stem from her stealthy departure a decade back. Can she hold on to her dreams, desires and choices in the face of the pressures? Will her near and dear ones let go of their bitterness and resentment towards her? Will she be able to find roots again in the home soil or will she have to flee to freedom yet again? “I am completely lost in the world,” she confesses.
Imanishi approaches the subject with sensitivity and compassion. In the world that she creates there are no heroes or villains, people are just products of their situations and circumstances. The protagonist is complicated, mercurial and contradictory in her impulses. Ten years expectedly have also made Mariam a different person. She is desperate to return but has no money or means for the journey. Her allies are uncle Abdallah (Chekh Mehdi) who had helped her escape back then and her former boyfriend Sidahmed (Omar Salem) who feels just as alienated as she is. There is also the guilt of having used him in the past and abandoned him for her own selfish gains.
Her mother (Eddami Elabed) and sister Selka (Khadija Najem Allal) might taunt Mariam but also have a playful sense of camaraderie and are reconciled to being content with what life offers them. They lend a lightness of touch and humour to the film particularly in the mother rebuking her for her piercings and trying to cleanse her by lighting incense. “You went there and became one of them… She has come back looking like a gangster,” she says, much to the merriment of others.
Mariam’s brother Alwali (Suleiman Filali) is protective, disallowing her to work with him in his drug trade. But it’s his girlfriend Ghalia (Ghizlane Lkoucha) who turns out to be the surprisingly like-minded confidante.
The ensemble of actors is finely attuned to each other with Nadhira Mohamed in the lead deserving a special mention for her heartfelt performance.
Frida Marzouk’s camera plays with the vast landscape—the desert and the ocean—the small homes, congested settlements and narrow lanes and the faces of the people to bring out the dilemmas and contradictions.
It’s entirely in the fitness of things that the filmmaker herself sports a hyphenated Japanese-American identity and one the film’s producers, Shrihari Sathe, happens to be an Indian filmmaker, born and raised in Mumbai. In fact, people of 19 nationalities are said to have worked together on the film.
Nomad Shadow is so entirely of its times in this show of diversity and multiculturalism. But, even more so, in the light of the situation the world over with things getting more and more insular in the face of the increasing animus against migrants and people of other communities and cultures. With the image of Mariam cast adrift, in the sea, as well as metaphorically, Nomad Shadow leaves the viewers with much to ponder.
