24/10/2021 A little more than one month after it won the Amplify Voices Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Gravedigger's Wife has scooped Africa's top film prize. The drama, by Finnish-Somali writer-director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, won the prestigious Stallion of Yennenga Grand Prize for Best Film at the Pan African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on Sunday. Filmed in Somali in Djibouti, the tenderly moving story of love and devotion follows Guled (Omar Abdi), a man who makes a precarious living from loss. Guled’s earnings pay to care for his wife Nasra (Somali-Canadian model Yasmin Warsame), whose kidney infection is slowly killing her. He can never hope to earn the cost of her treatment and Nasra, who is getting sicker, discourages Guled from returning to his home village to ask for help from the family that disowned him. She only wants to spend time with him and their troubled young son Mahad (Kadar Abdoul-Aziz Ibrahim). The film took home the 20 million franc ($35,714) CFA prize money and the golden stallion statue, beating 16 other African films to the top prize. The films in competition were made by directors from 15 different African countries. It was also Somalia's first official entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2021 Academy Awards, and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in July. Ahmed, 40, who was not in Ouagadougou to collect his prize, has previously said the film, which is his first full-length feature, was a way to change perceptions about Somali people. Ahmed grew up in Somalia before moving to Finland, and his film received Finnish, French and German funding. The Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, known as Fespaco, is the largest biannual meeting of African cinema, which attracts international and African cinema and television professionals from the continent and the diaspora to the Burkinabe capital.
