feature film
by Mo Harawe
Producers: Oliver Neumann, Sabine Moser
Production: FreibeuterFilm
SYNOPSIS
THE VILLAGE NEXT TO PARADISE follows a Somali family and their daily struggles during the course of a scorching hot, windy summer. All of this inseparable from the socio-political situation of a country living with civil war, natural disasters and a post-colonial legacy.
Mo Harawe was born in Mogadishu. He discovered his passion for cinema through art school in Somalia. Since 2009 Mo Harawe has been in Austria where his journey as a filmmaker began. His feature film script to Mogadishu has won the DOR FILM award at the Diagonale Film Festival in 2016. In 2019, Muhamed Harawe won the prestigious scholarship from the Austrian Federal Ministry for the Arts.
Since 2020 he has been studying a master’s degree in Visual Communication at the Art University in Kassel and has realized two short films, both shot in Somalia. Life on the Horn (2020) received a special mention at Locarno Film Festival and was shown at numerous festivals a.o. Uppsala – Int. Short Film Festival (Uppsala Award in Memory of Ingmar Bergman), Cairo International Film.
His latest short film Will my Parents come and see me (2022), celebrated its world premiere at Berlinale Shorts and is nominated for the European Film Awards in the short film category 2022. Mo is a Berlinale Talents 2022 alumni and is currently developing his debut feature film The Village next to Paradise at TorinoScriptLab.