biography

Mo Harawe was born in Mogadishu. He discovered his passion for cinema through art school in Somalia. Since 2009 Mo Harawe has been in Austria where his journey as a filmmaker began. His feature film script to Mogadishu has won the Dor Film award at the Diagonale Film Festival in 2016. In 2019, Mo Harawe won the prestigious scholarship from the Austrian Federal Ministry for the Arts. Since 2020 he has been studying a master’s degree in Visual Communication at the Art University in Kassel and has realised two short films, both shot in Somalia. Life on the Horn (2020) received a special mention at Locarno Film Festival and was shown at numerous festivals among others Uppsala Int. Short Film Festival (Uppsala Award in Memory of Ingmar Bergman) and Cairo International Film Festival. His latest short film Will My Parents Come and See Me (2022) celebrated its world premiere at Berlinale Shorts and is nominated for the European Film Awards in the short film category 2022. Mo is a Berlinale Talents 2022 alumni and is currently developing his debut feature film The Village Next to Paradise at TFL ScriptLab.

company profile

FreibeuterFilm was founded 2008 in Vienna to offer a platform for innovative, director-driven projects - fiction films and creative documentaries, focused on cinematic release. Under this banner more than 20 films have been produced, most of them presented at an A-Festival. The most recent films GREAT FREEDOM (dir. Sebastian Meise, 2021) received the Prix du Jury in Cannes - Un Certain Regard, as well as the Golden Heart as Best Film in Sarajevo IFF. HINTERLAND (dir. Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2021) celebrated its world premiere in Locarno at the Piazza Grande Section, and won the Prix du Public UBS.