Don’t tell me you’re afraid | Samia’s dream
On Popoli e Missione, in the column “Ciak dal mondo,” Miela Fagiolo D’Attilia reviews a film based on a true story
By Miela Fagiolo D’Attilia
Born with a desire to run, Samia is a little Somali girl who came into the world during the civil war in Mogadishu with dreams of becoming the fastest woman in her country.
Running is her dream, her life, and everything around her flows fast toward this destiny.
Inspired by Giuseppe Catozzella’s novel, the film “Don’t Tell Me You’re Afraid” (2024), shot by Yasemin Samdereli in collaboration with Deka Mohamed Osman, tells the story of a young athlete’s feat opposed by the ruling Islamic fundamentalists.
It is a story of great emotional impact because of the determination and courage of Samia Yusuf Omar, the athlete, only 17 years old, who represented Somalia in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, running without a veil.
“We know that we are different from other female athletes. But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like them. We know we are far from those competing here, we understand that very well. But more than anything we would like to prove our dignity and that of our country,” she said then, giving voice to her generation of women who hoped for the pacification and modernization of torn Somalia.
In the competition Samia (played by Ilham Mohamed Osman) comes in last, but she quickly becomes a symbol for Muslim women for the courage and self-determination she has demonstrated.
She is very young and early in her career; she has another Olympic appointment ahead of her, in Londa in 2012 where her dreams could come true.
She prepares hard, even at the cost of long and very hard training sessions, locked in a jumpsuit and burqua around Mogadishu, even despite the searches and vigilance of fundamentalists on this girl who is too determined to be as submissive as she should be.
When Samia loses her friend and trainer Ali (Elmi Rashid), she realizes that the time has come for her too to leave, alone, relying as always on the power of her legs to leave Africa behind and go to Europe.
In the film, flashbacks take the girl back in time, to her family, to her mother with her five siblings, to her father killed at the market in an ambush. On the journey, the migrants’ odyssey from Ethiopia to Sudan and across the Sahara to Libya, to arrive by sea in Italy, also begins for her.
Her dream, however, will be swallowed by the Mediterranean Sea in a shipwreck in 2013 in front of the island of Lampedusa.
The film successfully screened at Rome FilmFest 2024, is a tribute to a small heroine of our time.
A true story that tells the epic of thousands and thousands of people who too quickly disappear from collective memory and who instead are a heritage to be cherished.
(Miela Fagiolo D’Attilia, People and Mission 1/25, pp. 50-51)
Source
- Popoli e Missione