KASSIM

“I arrived in Italy in the late 1980s, when Europe and the West were still human and we Africans could come just with a visa and a plane.”

Kassim is a grown man who came to our country from Djibouti, the tiny African state surrounded by Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, with a strategic sea outlet. On his CV is listed an endless list of jobs: dishwasher, worker, digger on construction sites, salesman at Porta Portese (Rome’s Sunday market), clerk at one of Rome’s chicest stores, designer of a children’s fashion brand.

“But now I’m a film director.” Chosen almost by chance, first as an extra on the set of some TV dramas and then with increasingly important parts, he feels the irrepressible urge to put himself on the other side of the camera. “Italian cinema represents us the way it wants, it doesn’t listen, it doesn’t ask, it doesn’t live and understand what a Black person, a Muslim, a South American feels.” He began collaborating with screenwriters, established directors, writing and shooting his first shorts. In less than 10 years he made nine short films; with one he went to Cannes, with another to Venice.

Kassim’s camera aims high. “I would like to develop an African neorealism. You can be the best director in the world, but you need the soul, the humanity of Africa, the richest land in the world, the land that will save humanity.”

Some filmography:

2016 A special day (Cannes Film Festival)

2017 Idris (Venice Film Festival )

2020 Il vento sotto i piedi (The Wind Beneath Your Feet)

2020 Mirella (documentary )

2022 Guerra tra poveri (War of the Poor) (world premiere at the Rome Film Festival )