This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on January 11, 2021
The Malabar region of Kerala is home to a form of football known as “Sevens” – seven players a side, a smaller pitch, slightly different rules. In places like Malappuram, where Sudani From Nigeria is set, football is more popular than cricket, and each village will have their own team, with tournaments running over several months (November to May) and players recruited from African nations such as Sudan, Nigeria, and Gambia. This is the world that Sudani From Nigeria drops us into: the local team MYC Accode, managed by Majeed (Soubin Shahir), has recently acquired three Nigerian players, including Samuel (Samuel Abiola Robinson), playing well enough that the team sees its fortunes on the rise, and its star player gathering local fans. The film’s title comes from the fact that most of the fans just lump the African players into one bundle, calling them “Sudanis”. When Samuel tries to correct some fans who greet him after a match, telling them he’s not from Sudan, he’s from Nigeria, they immediately dub him the Sudani from Nigeria.
Majeed’s world is already precarious – on some level, this is about his ability to juggle his responsibilities as manager of his team, with money leaving his hands almost the minute he picks it up after a match. So when Samuel has a fall in the bathroom, ending up with a sprained wrist, a back injury, and an ankle injury requiring surgery, it sets off a series of events that see Majeed scrambling to find ways to pay for his care, and dealing with an ever-widening circle of police and immigration bureaucracy, all while trying to keep his team on a winning path towards the rolling trophy.
But Sudani From Nigeria is about much more than football. Samuel, after his accident, spends much of the film’s run-time flat on his back, as events circle around him. Samuel is the catalyst for the film to explore a wide range of issues. Majeed lives with his mother, Jameela (Savithri Sreedharan), but keeps his interactions with her to a minimum (she comments, ruefully, that he rarely calls her “mother” anymore, and we get a glimpse into how desperately sad she is when, looking after Samuel, she wishes it were Majeed who was ill, just so he would need her to care for him). Majeed is bitter that, after the death of his father, his mother remarried and left him, not understanding that she was pressured to do so by her family. She returned to live with Majeed because she felt he needed her. Her husband, Majeed’s step-father (K.T.C. Abdullah), works as a security guard and only visits his wife, something Majeed barely tolerates, his old wounds and anger never far from the surface.
Sudani From Nigeria is also a reflection of the community Majeed lives in. Many in his largely Muslim neighbourhood come to peer at Samuel out of curiosity, but some also come to help care for him – like Jameela’s neighbor and friend Beeyumma (Sarasa Balussery), and the older gentleman who demonstrates Kalari (Kalaripayattu) for Samuel’s amusement. At the same time as he’s trying to manage his team and Samuel’s care and expenses, Majeed is also trying to arrange his own marriage – challenging, of course, because the women Majeed sees are educated and planning further studies and work. Majeed has little education, practically no money, and his life revolves around managing his Sevens team, making him a less than desirable match. Majeed’s circle of friends help him as best they can – his friend Latheef (Navas Vallikkunnu) even goes as far as taking out a gold loan on his wife’s ornaments to help pay for Samuel’s medical expenses.
I’m not sure I could argue that it’s only in Malayalam cinema that you get films like this – featuring well-rounded casts with lots of interesting characters, and a role for an actor like Soubin Shahir who might well be permanently relegated to character or supporting roles in any other industry. That said, it’s one of the reasons I fell so deeply in love with Malayalam cinema – this capacity to share well-written, well-crafted stories about places and people who aren’t larger than life heroes. Not that there’s anything wrong with a big massy film – but sometimes you need more than that, and Malayalam cinema certainly serves up more of these. Shahir is perfect as Majeed – showing us a man who is aware of his limitations, but works to surpass them despite the odds not being in his favour. There’s a look of quiet desperation in his eyes as he juggles everything in his life and tries to keep his dream of managing his Sevens team alive. Majeed’s life would probably be much easier if he sold the team (as one character suggests) and just found more stable employment. But given how many Keralites move to the Gulf states to find employment and support their families (you only have to look as far as Majeed’s neighbor Beeyumma, whose son works in the Gulf while his family lives with his mother), there’s probably no guarantee that Majeed would do any better than he is already – and at least his Seven’s team, with all its stresses, comes with its moment of happiness and achievement as well.
If the film has any weak spot, it’s the portions that attempt to provide Samuel with a back story: Samuel tells Majeed his parents died in the civil war – but the timing of that would make Samuel much older than he is. He also talks about being in a refugee camp with his grandmother and two sisters – it might make more sense that his parents would have been killed in something like the bombing of a camp in 2017. Am I being too picky about these details? Possibly, but when the film manages to flesh out other characters, dropping interesting details that serve to create the film’s rich canvas of characters, then I wish writer/director Zakariya Mohammed and his co-writer Muhsin Parari had made just a little bit more effort with Samuel (especially in light of some of the casual racism the film depicts – for example, the match announcements that depict the players as animals from darkest Africa, to the neighbours who come to peer at Samuel because they’ve never seen a black person before). That said – Samuel could easily have been left merely as the plot device that sets the film’s broader themes in action, so I appreciate the effort of the writers to at least create a character we can care about, whose struggles and hardships help us understand why he’s come all the way to India to play a game that, as popular as it is in Kerala, sits firmly on the fringes of the football world.