“Whispers of a Burning Scent”: Can We Ever Know What Someone Truly Feels?

Some stories ask audiences to decide who is innocent and who is guilty. Mo Harawe’s Whispers of a Burning Scent, an official BlackStar Film Festival selection, instead makes that decision uncomfortable from the start. The Somali film follows Hanfade, a reserved wedding musician whose private life is abruptly thrust into public view. On the day he is due to perform at an important wedding, he is taken from band rehearsal to court, where he faces accusations of exploiting his marriage to Xaliimo, an elderly woman. Her children believe they know exactly who he is: a predatory husband who married their mother without their knowledge and used her declining mental capacity to gain access to her property. Hanfade sees himself differently, or at least appears to. He insists that he loves his wife. The film refuses to make the gap between those interpretations easy to close.

Harawe gives us the kind of evidence that makes judgment feel inevitable, then steadily complicates certainty without ever replacing it with an alternative truth. We know Hanfade married a woman much older than himself. We know her children accuse him of fraud. We know properties were sold during their marriage. These facts are difficult to separate from the suspicion surrounding him. But Whispers of a Burning Scent is not interested in offering the piece of information that would let us comfortably settle the matter.

Instead, it places the audience in a position not unlike the court’s. We are presented with fragments, and those fragments shape our judgement. We watch the people who believe Hanfade has harmed Xaliimo make their case, and we watch him react. We watch him move through the city with the weight of those accusations following him. We watch him visit his wife. But Harawe withholds the one thing that might make a definitive judgment possible: access to Hanfade’s inner life. That absence keeps the tension in place.

Hanfade is constantly being watched. In the courtroom, his wife’s children and the legal system scrutinise him. Outside it, the accusation follows him into the spaces where he is supposed to be anonymous, including the wedding where he performs as a keyboardist. The audience becomes another observer, searching his expressions and silences searching for evidence of what he really feels. Yet his face never fully gives him away.

Omar Abdi’s performance is crucial to that ambiguity. Hanfade is not played with the obvious calculation of a man trying to conceal guilt, nor with the uncomplicated tenderness of an innocent person wrongfully accused. Instead, Abdi’s performance keeps him difficult to read. His hesitations, glances, and extended silences can suggest remorse, fear, embarrassment, or genuine grief depending on what the viewer has already decided about him. The performance effectively turns ambiguity into a mirror. What we see in Hanfade often depends on what we arrived expecting to see.

This becomes particularly apparent when he visits Xaliimo. Away from the courtroom and her children’s accusations, there appears to be real affection between them. That affection complicates the image of a purely opportunistic husband. But it does not absolve him either. Love, the film seems to suggest, is not necessarily evidence of innocence.

A person can love someone and still hurt them. Genuine affection can exist alongside exploitation. And the fact that we cannot easily determine where Hanfade falls does not mean the distinction is irrelevant. It means we do not have enough of the truth to confidently decide innocence or guilt. That is where Whispers of a Burning Scent becomes interested in the uncomfortable difference between knowing what someone has done and understanding why they did it.

Harawe’s storytelling deliberately excludes the kind of explanatory detail that audiences have come to expect from stories about moral wrongdoing. There is no convenient flashback revealing how Hanfade and Xaliimo met. We are not given an extensive account of their marriage. Nor does the film offer a climactic confession that reorganises everything we have seen. Harawe allows the narrative to remain incomplete. For some viewers, that restraint may be frustrating. The film raises questions it has no intention of conclusively answering. But its refusal to resolve those questions is precisely the point. Human beings are not transparent simply because they have been accused, and understanding a person’s actions does not grant us access to their motives.

The film’s documentary-like visual approach reinforces that feeling. Its grounded photography and sound give the impression that we are observing Hanfade. Long stretches of silence and carefully held compositions allow meaning to emerge through how people look at one another, or refuse to. The film repeatedly asks its audience to interpret a gesture, an expression or a pause without confirming whether that interpretation is correct.

Hanfade spends much of the story under other people’s gaze. His wife’s children have already constructed an explanation for his marriage. The court is tasked with assessing the evidence against him. The wedding guests encounter him without necessarily knowing the private crisis unfolding around him. And through it all, he must continue to perform, both literally and figuratively.

That parallel between his public performance as a musician and his forced performance of innocence is one of the film’s most quietly effective ideas. Hanfade cannot escape being seen, but being seen is not the same as being known. By the time the film reaches its decisive moment, Whispers of a Burning Scent has resisted the temptation to turn uncertainty into revelation. Harawe instead leaves the audience with the more difficult possibility that some people remain fundamentally unknowable to us, even when their lives have been subjected to intense scrutiny.

His wife’s children see a man who preyed on their vulnerable mother. Hanfade may see himself as a husband being asked to abandon the woman he loves. The court must assess the difference, and so must we. Whispers of a Burning Scent never tells us whose version to believe. It simply leaves us with the uneasy knowledge that understanding someone and believing them are two different things.