Short Film Premiere & Discussion: A Tale of Three Cities

Kayd kindly invites you to the premier of ‘Blue Lines’, a short poem-film about Somali life in three UK cities: Sheffield, Bristol and London. This original creative work is an innovative output from a research project led by the University of Manchester, in collaboration with a team of Somali-heritage creatives; poets Anzal Omar, Asmaa Jama, Ibrahim Hirsi and film-maker [Insert film-maker name]. The project aimed to understand how Somali communities experience a ‘sense of home’ in the UK, and how different cities give rise to different experiences. Based on consultations with more than one hundred people, three Somali-heritage poets, one from each of the UK cities, have composed new works which express a Somali sense of home in UK urban life. The three poems were then combined with stunning visuals to produce an original poem-film. Join us for the premier of this cross-disciplinary collaboration and a post-screening discussion with the poets, film-makers and members of the research team from the University of Manchester. In collaboration with the Anglo-Somali Society and the University of Manchester.

Contributors Include:

Anzal Omar is a Somali British poet based in Sheffield and a member of Hive Poetry Collective. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, most recently in The Rising Line (Hive Books). She was a shadow judge for the Forward Prizes 2025 as part of Young Poets Summit. Anzal's work is an exacting study of debris: historical, feminine and political. She writes toward the fractures of exile, examining the structures that shape immigrant life and the wreckage left behind

Asmaa Jama is an award-winning poet, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Bristol. Asma’s poetry has been widely published in journals including The Poetry Review, Ambit, and Magma and in 2024 they won the Geoffrey Dearmer Poetry Prize, having been previously commended for the Brunel African Poetry prize.

Ibrahim Hirsi is a writer, archivist, and editor at Journal Gobanimo. He is a co-founder of Koor Archives and is currently working on his first monograph, which explores the metre of southern Somali poetic forms. His work has been published in The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PBLJ, and the anthology Before Them, We (Flipped Eye, 2022).

Dr. Muna Abdi is a researcher, consultant, leadership coach, speaker and founder working at the intersection of leadership, community accountability, racial equity and organisational change.

Dr. Cathy Wilcock is a political anthropologist and cultural geographer specialising in East Africa and its European diasporas. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, where she researches transnational connections, political movements and communities, with a particular focus on the Somali peninsula.

Osman Jama is a filmmaker and producer at Kayd Somali Arts and Culture. He is also the Director of Production at Somaliland National TV.

Language: English