PART THREE OF THREE
In Part One of our profile of filmmaker Nijla Mu’min, we traced her East Bay roots and her debut feature, Jinn, which announced her as a defining voice in Black Muslim cinema. In Part Two, we followed the fifteen-year struggle to bring Noor, a story of Black-Palestinian love, to a world that has not always been ready to receive it.
In this final installment, we arrive at the work Mu’min has most recently placed before us: a film about Black maternal grief that arrived in the middle of a national reckoning, and a production company named for her grandmother’s kitchen that tells you everything about where her art comes from. This is where the through-line of her career, the radical act of holding space, comes into sharpest focus.
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Water, Memory, and Loss
Mu’min’s most recent work sharpens that commitment into something that cuts across all of Black womanhood. Water Angel, which she wrote and directed, aired on In Bloom’s YouTube channel on August 14, 2025. The film follows Jawny and Jamal as they navigate the maternal health crisis that is devastating Black families across the United States.
The film arrived in a moment of heightened national attention. A TikTok video depicting Karrie Jones, a Black woman in active labor, doubled over in a wheelchair at Dallas Regional Medical Center in Mesquite, Texas, crying out in pain while a white nurse appeared to ignore her distress, drew more than 36 million views. Jones’ baby was born just twelve minutes after the footage was recorded. The video made viscerally visible what Black women have long known: that the crisis is not abstract, and that the consequences of being unseen are sometimes fatal.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women in the United States are approximately three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. The pattern extends across the Atlantic: a 2025 report by MBRRACE-UK found that Black women in England remain statistically more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared to white women, even as overall maternal mortality rates have declined.
“Water is a very important part of my films. So for Water Angel, it was important. Jawny loves being at the beach; there is this intuitive spirit, and being near water really brings that out.
“I didn’t get to explore it in the film, but a water birth is something Jawny wants. And the fact that her baby doesn’t survive, it’s devastating, but that is her ‘angel,’ and that is how that title hits me. At times, when mothers lose their child, they have to remember them. There is a grieving journey they have to go through. So Water Angel is the memory and spirit of her unborn child,” Mu’min says.
“There is a lot of medical racism, unconscious bias, professionals are overworked, but at the same time, people are suffering and need to be heard and seen, especially Black women. My films are what I envision and what I want, and I create characters and words that show the love and the comfort I would like to receive. It’s not just Jawny; it’s also Jamal. It takes community to get through these situations,” Mu’min says.
Though Jawny is denied adequate medical care, she achieves a victorious ascension by showing her giving to others the very thing she was refused: when she becomes a doula, holding space for the women who come after her. That cycle of grace received and grace extended is at the heart of Mu’min’s filmmaking. Her characters do not merely survive; they become vessels for the tenderness the world withheld from them.
“My films are what I envision and what I want, and I create characters and words that show the love and the comfort I would like to receive.”
Sweet Potato Pie: Carving Memory, Crafting Worlds
In Queen Sugar, Season 3, Episode 9, The Tree and Stone Were One, the character Aunt Viola, under Mu’min’s direction, is captured preparing sweet potato pie. She is clearly under pressure, yet she works from a place of deep passion and comfort. It is an intentional tribute to Mu’min’s grandmother, a devotion further reflected in the name of her production company, Sweet Potato Pie Productions.
It would be easy, and not inaccurate, to describe Mu’min’s body of work as a sustained act of reclamation: taking back the right of Black Muslim women and girls to be seen in their full humanity. But for Mu’min, the work is simpler and larger than that at once. It is about following the story where it leads.
“I always want to do different things, but I think the core of it is humanity and that inner life of people. The film I am writing right now is very different, but that is the beauty of the journey: you will get called to certain stories, and you are being called for a reason.
“I want to direct shows that have nothing to do with African Americans or Black identity. I might be on a sci-fi show or a medical show, especially after Water Angel. But I want to keep with the humanity and love at the core,” Mu’min says.
That, perhaps, is the through-line. She commits to ensuring that whatever world she builds on screen, the people inside it get to be held.
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From Jinn to Noor is a three-part profile of filmmaker Nijla Mu’min. Read Part One on her origins and debut feature, and Part Two on Noor and the meaning of solidarity cinema.
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.