Collective Care and Human Rights Cinema: Musa Syeed's A Stray and Somali Minneapolis

Abstract

Minnesota is home to the largest US Somali population, and Musa Syeed's 2016 film, A Stray, shows aspects of the Minneapolis community usually obscured by the US media. This essay argues that Syeed's film marks a departure from conventional human rights films about refugees through its refusal to show bodily suffering or play to clichés about Muslims conflicting with Western social norms. Instead, A Stray thematizes the many forms of territorial control to which people inhabiting the Minneapolis Riverside Plaza projects are subject and focuses on the improvised and communal spaces that enable the characters to create sustaining networks. I interpret A Stray as a film that deploys neorealism's most prominent elements to narrate a relational humanism that embeds Adan in his community and sustains his religious faith. A Stray defies the genre of human rights films that attempt to humanize refugees in order to appeal for rights or animate audience sympathies. It does so through its encounters (often nomadic) with the urban spaces of Minneapolis, its incorporation of religious motifs and hadith, and its refusal to propel its characters toward assimilation or liberal notions of self-responsibilization.