Somali director Khadar Ahmed plans hitwoman revenge thriller after Cannes triumph

Somali filmmaker Khadar Ayderus Ahmed readies ‘Thundering Smoke,’ a bold return to East Africa’s silver screen

LONDON — One of the most intriguing new voices in African cinema is setting his sights on a daring second act. Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, the Somali director who charmed Cannes and gathered armfuls of festival prizes with his feature debut The Gravedigger’s Wife, is preparing his next film: a genre-bending thriller about a middle-aged Somali hitwoman who returns to the village that once expelled her.

A hitwoman comes home

Thundering Smoke, Ahmed’s new project, will be unveiled next week at the Finnish Film Affair, the industry showcase aligned with the Helsinki International Film Festival – Love & Anarchy (Sept. 24–26). Producers describe a tense, character-driven odyssey set in a remote Somali village, where Barni, a woman in her fifties, reemerges after years in hiding to settle a score with Ardo, a crime boss who rules by fear. Her violent reappearance is witnessed by a young bus conductor who becomes obsessed with discovering her identity. That chase twists into an unlikely, intimate connection between hunter and witness.

It’s not hard to see why programmers and sales agents are paying attention. Cinema rarely hands a Somali woman in her fifties the lead role, let alone one that upends stereotypes, embraces genre, and questions power. Ahmed, born in Mogadishu and now based in Helsinki, is very open about ambition here. He calls Thundering Smoke “much more ambitious” than his first feature, envisioning it as the second work in a loose trilogy about “the lengths people go for love.” If The Gravedigger’s Wife explored how far a family will go to keep each other alive, this new film appears ready to ask how far someone will go to reclaim their life—and their story.

From Djibouti’s dusty lanes to the world’s red carpets

Ahmed’s rise has been swift and somewhat improbable. His debut, shot in Djibouti on a modest budget, premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week in 2021 and quietly bucked expectations for a first feature from the Horn of Africa. The tale—a family’s urgent race to fund a life-saving kidney operation—was told with humor and tenderness, and with an eye deeply immersed in place. Variety’s Guy Lodge praised it as a “plaintively moving debut feature,” highlighting its understated grace. The film went on to become Somalia’s first submission for the best international feature Oscar.

From Cannes, it crossed continents. It snagged the Amplify Voices Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and took home the Golden Stallion of Yennenga at FESPACO, Africa’s premier film prize. It played the Safar Film Festival in the UK, Oslo’s Films from the South, and the Luxor African Film Festival, pulling new audiences into Somali storytelling—audiences long distant from the region’s narratives, except when filtered through news headlines.

Ahmed admits he didn’t initially intend to be the one behind the camera. “At the time, I didn’t even know if I wanted to direct,” he recalled of his debut. He had imagined himself a screenwriter, until he realized he “might never find somebody that can tell this story the way I want to tell it.” Shooting for the first time in Africa changed him, he says. He fell for the colors, the light, the landscapes—and for the lineage that stretches from masters like Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty to Mahamat-Saleh Haroun and Abderrahmane Sissako. “It’s just endless possibilities,” he says now of African cinema. “I really want to push the boundaries [and] see how far I can go as a filmmaker.”

Co-productions and the new map of African cinema

Thundering Smoke is also a story about how films get made today. The project is a five-country co-production led by Sébastien Onomo of France’s Special Touch Studios, with Finland’s Rabbit Films, Luxembourg’s Paul Thiltges Distributions, Norway’s STÆR, and Canada’s Périphéria Productions attached. Location scouting in East Africa is expected later this year.

For many filmmakers from Africa and its diasporas, this co-production framework is no longer a luxury; it’s the operating system. Pooling resources across borders helps stories travel—through markets, across festivals, and onto the screens where audiences are increasingly discovering global cinema. Streaming platforms have accelerated that shift, but the festival circuit remains the launchpad: a place where a Somali hitwoman can stand on equal footing with European arthouse and American indie fare.

Finland, where Ahmed is based, has become a surprising node in this network. The Helsinki International Film Festival – Love & Anarchy leans into bold, nonconformist voices, and the Finnish Film Affair draws buyers and programmers from across Europe looking for risk-takers. It’s an apt stage for a project that wants to both thrill and unsettle.

What a middle-aged assassin tells us

Barni, the film’s protagonist, arrives as both a subversion and a reckoning. Cinema has long loved its antiheroes—men with hard pasts, haunted eyes, and scores to settle. Ahmed’s choice to cast a Somali woman in that role challenges expectations of who gets to embody rage, resilience, and moral ambiguity. And it does so against the backdrop of a country too often seen only through conflict. Here, the village is not a footnote; it’s the canvas. The young bus conductor who bears witness becomes our proxy, drawn toward the mystery, then implicated by it.

That combination—stylized action, intimate character study, and a sense of place that breathes—was the quiet power of The Gravedigger’s Wife. In Thundering Smoke, Ahmed hints at longer shadows and sharper edges. The title evokes something elemental: thunder you hear before you see it, smoke that tells you a fire is burning just out of frame.

The stakes beyond the screen

There is a larger story unfurling around Ahmed’s filmography. The past few years have seen a steady resurgence of African cinema on the global stage, from big festival wins to the flowering of national film funds and training labs. Yet for artists from the Horn of Africa, practical obstacles—funding, infrastructure, distribution—persist. A project like Thundering Smoke, with one foot in East Africa and another in European production houses, offers a pragmatic path forward: tell the story at home, build the financing abroad, and invite the world in.

As Thundering Smoke enters the marketplace in Helsinki, the questions are as much about craft as they are about consequence. Can a film bridge the thrill of genre with the specificity of Somali life? Can a hitwoman’s return open a window onto the complexities of power and memory in a place that too often gets flattened into headlines? And what might happen if more filmmakers from Mogadishu to Djibouti City are given the means to test those “endless possibilities” Ahmed talks about?

What to watch next

The team behind Thundering Smoke hopes to firm up financing and set locations by year’s end. If momentum builds at the Finnish Film Affair, a festival premiere in 2026 would not be out of reach. Wherever it lands, the industry will be watching—for the audacity of a Somali woman reclaiming her narrative, and for a director determined to stretch the frame wider than before.

Ahmed’s journey from a modest Djibouti shoot to Cannes and Toronto is a reminder: the next great cinematic voice can emerge from anywhere, with a story that feels both rooted and universal. In a crowded festival year, that’s the kind of thunder audiences still strain to hear—and the kind of smoke that lingers long after the credits roll.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.