As a Half Somali/Half Korean, my two separate worlds have truly collided.
Mogadishu is a new movie that will air this summer, it’ll be very popular considering it will be Jo In-Sung’s first big screen movie in over two years.
From “Black hawk down” to “Captain Phillip” Somalis have been depicted and stereotyped as backward barbaric savages in need of the white mans help. They always cast non-somalis that look like they’re dying and have them speak gibberish. I mean imagine a movie in china where they have a vietnamese play the chinese role and go “ching chong ling long”? Quite racist.
Now Korea is making a movie about Koreans escaping Somalia after civil war broke out in 1991. Both the North and South Korean embassies will help each other to escape. Reality is people who worked at embassies were air lifted out of Somalia IMMEDIATELY. The people who struggled were MY people, hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced worldwide. We’ve always been the butt of the joke and mocked out for the past 20 years because of this horrid movies (thanks hollywood 😑)
Currently there are no known Somali actors in this movie which is interesting because Koreans hate when non-Koreans play koreans in western media. It’s also being filmed in Morocco, somalia obviously isn’t safe. I think Morocco is a good idea because it kinda looks like Somalia pre-war. Somalia’s nicknames back then were “White pearl of the Indian ocean” “lions of africa” and “Switzerland of Africa”. We are human too, after 30 years if war Somalia has finally started to have economic development, we’ve discovered more oil than some wealthy middle eastern countries could ever dream about. I hope korea doesn’t protray my other half as some barbaric dirty africans. Somalis have already started to boycott the movie because they believe korea doesn’t have the right to profit off of somali trauma.
What do you think?
