PART ONE OF THREE
There is a moment in Nilja Mu’min’s 2014 film Deluge that tells you everything you need to know about her as a filmmaker. The mother of the story’s fifteen-year-old protagonist, Tiana, is frying chicken steaks in a pan when her husband comes behind her, wraps his arms around her, and gently sways. They dance, not for themselves, but in full view of their daughter. Nobody announces it as significant. It simply is.
This is a snapshot into Mu’min’s cinema: the art of being held. Black women on screen are often denied softness, and when it comes to Black Muslim women, they barely appear. Mu’min carves out worlds where her characters are permitted to exist and receive grace. They get to be seen, to be touched, and to have someone hold space for them. It is, as she herself says, a radical act.
A native of the East Bay Area, Mu’min has built a body of work that spans short films, independent features, and writing-and-directing credits on some of the most ambitious television of the past decade. Her films are grounded in the people she grew up with, the African-American Muslim community of her childhood, whose textured, layered lives rarely made it to the screen.
“It was really the people I saw growing up and the person I am that informed the storytelling. I wanted to write stories and make films about people and worlds that we just don’t really see. So, growing up and being immersed in an African-American Muslim community and seeing people in that community that had all these different identities that I didn’t see reflected in the mainstream, I wanted to complicate that. They are just people. Even if you’re not Black and Muslim, you can find humanity,” Mu’min tells Sapelo Square.
The literary tradition she draws from is just as intentional. Contemporary Black fiction, novels that drew on African-American history and gave their characters complexity and interiority, was where her filmmaking imagination first took root. That influence is evident in the voice-overs and poetry threaded through her earlier works, including Deluge, in which Tiana witnesses the tragic drowning of her friends and must decide whether to join the order of Black mermaids tasked with protecting those sacred waters.
Jinn: The Worldly, the Otherworldly, and the In-Between
Mu’min first came to wider attention in 2017 when she launched a fundraising campaign for her debut feature film Jinn, which is arguably a landmark of contemporary Black Muslim cinema. It is a coming-of-age story centered on Summer, a girl who explores her identity and sexuality as her mother journeys to Islam. The film is cinematographically pleasing and symbolically rich in its treatment of faith, Blackness, and the turbulence of growing up.
“Jinn was very important, as it helped launch me into a career in television and as a writer. That film is the culmination of years of honing my directing, my screenwriting, and working with actors. I really wanted to tell a story that spoke to me, one that conveyed the universal struggle of growing up: falling in love, having turbulent relationships with your parents, making mistakes, and not being punished, as well as the transformation that comes with it. That’s personal, and universal, and through the African-American lens, a world I wanted to give texture to.”
“Every time I watch it, I’m moved. As a creator, that’s the greatest gift. We’re approaching the 10th anniversary of this film, as we began production in 2017. It’s beautiful, the impact it’s had,” Mu’min explains to Sapelo Square.
The themes of Black girlhood, Black Muslim girlhood, and the passage into womanhood that Jinn explores can be found in Mu’min’s television work, including writing and directing for Issa Rae’s Insecure, Ava DuVernay’s Queen Sugar, and Apple TV+’s Swagger.
“There are a lot of complications in our existence. There is a great deal of danger in the stereotyping that surrounds us. We don’t really get the opportunity to lean into our softness, innocence, and confusion. When I was growing up, there was a lot of rhetoric, pop culture, and music that didn’t fully represent my identity. So we have to define ourselves. When I think of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, and other Black women filmmakers’ work, I wanted to follow in that legacy of self-definition,” Mu’min says.
―
Continues in Part Two
In Jinn, Mu’min gave Black Muslim girlhood a world built from the inside out, where Summer’s confusion was not a flaw to be corrected but a landscape to be honored. But even as that film opened doors, another story was already in motion: one set in Brooklyn, reaching across oceans, and asking what it means to love across difference when the world is on fire. In Part Two, we follow the fifteen-year journey of Noor, Mu’min’s most contested and most urgent work.
Adama Juldeh Munu is an award-winning journalist and producer for TRT World. Her work has been published by Al Jazeera, HuffPost, Middle East Eye, the New Arab, and Black Ballad. She writes about race, Black heritage, and issues connecting Islam and the African diaspora.
Feature image: Still from Jinn. Directed by Nijla Mu’min, 2018.
No comments