{"id":22,"date":"2021-05-26T09:21:11","date_gmt":"2021-05-26T13:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/?p=22"},"modified":"2021-05-26T09:21:13","modified_gmt":"2021-05-26T13:21:13","slug":"sudani-from-nigeria-dir-zakariya-mohammed-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/2021\/05\/26\/sudani-from-nigeria-dir-zakariya-mohammed-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Sudani From Nigeria (dir. Zakariya Mohammed, 2018)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This post first appeared on Totally Filmi on January 11, 2021<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Malabar region of Kerala is home to a form of football known as \u201cSevens\u201d \u2013 seven players a side, a smaller pitch, slightly different rules.  In places like Malappuram, where Sudani From Nigeria<\/strong> 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<\/strong> 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\u2019s title comes from the fact that most of the fans just lump the African players into one bundle, calling them \u201cSudanis\u201d.  When Samuel tries to correct some fans who greet him after a match, telling them he\u2019s not from Sudan, he\u2019s from Nigeria, they immediately dub him the Sudani from Nigeria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Majeed\u2019s world is already precarious \u2013 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Sudani_from_Nigeria_poster\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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But\u00a0Sudani From Nigeria<\/strong>\u00a0is about much more than football.\u00a0 Samuel, after his accident, spends much of the film\u2019s run-time flat on his back, as events circle around him.\u00a0 Samuel is the catalyst for the film to explore a wide range of issues.\u00a0 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 \u201cmother\u201d 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She returned to live with Majeed because she felt he needed her.\u00a0 Her husband, Majeed\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sudani From Nigeria<\/strong> 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 \u2013 like Jameela\u2019s neighbor and friend Beeyumma (Sarasa Balussery), and the older gentleman who demonstrates Kalari (Kalaripayattu) for Samuel\u2019s amusement.  At the same time as he\u2019s trying to manage his team and Samuel\u2019s care and expenses, Majeed is also trying to arrange his own marriage \u2013 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\u2019s circle of friends help him as best they can \u2013 his friend Latheef (Navas Vallikkunnu) even goes as far as taking out a gold loan on his wife\u2019s ornaments to help pay for Samuel\u2019s medical expenses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not sure I could argue that it\u2019s only in Malayalam cinema that you get films like this \u2013 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\u2019s one of the reasons I fell so deeply in love with Malayalam cinema \u2013 this capacity to share well-written, well-crafted stories about places and people who aren\u2019t larger than life heroes.  Not that there\u2019s anything wrong with a big massy film \u2013 but sometimes you need more than that, and Malayalam cinema certainly serves up more of these.  Shahir is perfect as Majeed \u2013 showing us a man who is aware of his limitations, but works to surpass them despite the odds not being in his favour.  There\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s neighbor Beeyumma, whose son works in the Gulf while his family lives with his mother), there\u2019s probably no guarantee that Majeed would do any better than he is already \u2013 and at least his Seven\u2019s team, with all its stresses, comes with its moment of happiness and achievement as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the film has any weak spot, it\u2019s the portions that attempt to provide Samuel with a back story:  Samuel tells Majeed his parents died in the civil war \u2013 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 \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 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\u2019ve never seen a black person before).  That said \u2013 Samuel could easily have been left merely as the plot device that sets the film\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cSevens\u201d \u2013 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…<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingSudani From Nigeria (dir. Zakariya Mohammed, 2018)<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,11,12,16,15,13,17],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-malayalam-movies","tag-samuel-abiola-robinson","tag-sarasa-balussery","tag-savithri-sreedharan","tag-soubin-shahir","tag-sudani-from-nigeria","tag-zakariya-mohammed","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/27"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totallyfilmi.toutes-directions.com\/totallyfilmi-wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}