Will My Parents Come To See Me

 Critique by Tomasz Raczkowski

Although it could seem that the genre of “last moments of death-sentenced detainees” is a worn-out narrative trope, it continues to provide filmmakers with a suggestive dramatic frame, which enables the visual story to dwell into the liminal states of consciously moving between life and death. Such is the case with Will My Parents Come To See Me, recently premiered at Berlinale Shorts during the 2022 edition of the biggest film festival in the world. Mo Harawe’s short is a plain yet meaningful, very concrete story of the life-exiting process as experienced by a young Somali man.

The movie remarkably starts and ends with a shot of a female prison guard sitting alone in her car. For a while we are tempted to suspect her as a main character of this story and in a powerful narrative shift, she indeed becomes one towards the end. This is not, however, about her experience, but in Harawe’s story she rather serves as a embodiment of the system, which acts through its representatives and remains after the story of a detainee dissolves. The system remains intact, but its human representatives must live with an inexplicable burden. In this manner Will My Parents Come To See Me resembles former Berlinale winner There Is No Evil, where the cold state machine also is an unshown phantom presence harassing those who are put within its tribes.

Unlike Mohammad Rasoulof however, Harawe makes the workers of the state prison system merely a context and focuses primarily on the detainee heading towards the end, which is his own apocalypse, while being another case closed in the reports. We slowly observe his final moments shot in static precise manner, without really exploring his feelings and hidden emotions – we see just a raw strain of situations, which come together as a softly touching case study. Despite learning virtually nothing about the protagonist, we are forced to look at just some randomly picked man sentenced to capital punishment. We don’t get to evaluate his guilt, reflect on motifs or remorse. We don’t even know what he is sentenced for. We must face the brutality of capital punishment without a benefit of justification. Therefore, this is not a moral tale posing questions of what is right or wrong – the issue here is a fundamental problem of lawfully destroying someone’s life. In Harawe’s vision it is significantly stripped of any context and brought to ethical essentials.

Build steadily within a frame of prison system, the film centers on the titular question, which is the only moment, where the protagonist expresses any kind of fragility in his situation. Those seven words contain all his fear, anxiety and vulnerability in the moment. Set in a slow narrative rhythm they become an invocation in what develops to be a story of a farewell ritual, leading towards the tragic climax. Like a ritual, the situation made into a film remains perfectly fit within social rules, but brings the significant load of unsettlement to its participants. Will My Parents… navigates this unsettlement to be the key experience for a viewer, who, despite his limited ability to immerse into the story and its contexts, leaves the screening somehow touched. 

 Mo Harawe achieves this effects with respectable economics of film language. He cautiously measures the pace and the amount of information the viewer gets to necessary minimum, so that Will My Parents Come To See Me would not become some exaggerated manifesto about a morally ambiguous situation, but rather a challenge with its stillness study of a universal problem. The director uses his 28 minutes perfectly, showing his maturity as a creator. His presence at Berlinale should be regarded as a successful one. His film is one to remember after the event – which is the main thing that it should achieve. After 50+ movies going through me within 10 days of Berlinale, half an hour with Will My Parents Come To See Me is one of the vivid moments I retain.