The question, “Where are you from?” can be a complex one in Aotearoa New Zealand. When Ahmad, a young man intoxicated by his own notoriety, is asked the question on live TV in a scene from Miles from Nowhere, his charm drains away.
“I was born in Avondale,” he says, suddenly flustered. Then things get messy.
It’s an ordinary problem, says Mohamed Hassan, poet, journalist and writer and creator of Miles from Nowhere – and the child of Egyptian immigrants. “Like myself, Ahmad has an accent that people question all the time and feel weird about.”
Ahmad, played by Australian actor Sami Afuni, is the annoying buddy of the show’s lead character Said (Arlo Green). Ahmad deals with the tensions of identity by focusing on the idea that he’s a good-looking Instagram celebrity while Said is just a 20-something loser who can’t keep a girlfriend or a job ‒ an aspiring singer-songwriter too shy to get behind a mic.
“All of these things are ordinary,” says Hassan. “Then, when you add a layer of politics on top of that, it suddenly complicates everything. And that is kind of what the story is about. That is also where the comedy and the chaos come from.”
Miles From Nowhere is a comedy – and a confidently funny one – but the “layer of politics” in the story is serious. Ahmad’s showy behaviour has brought him and Said to the attention of the SIS. Gabe (Benedict Wall), the agent assigned to keep an eye on them, takes a shine to Said’s music. Soon, Said doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. The idea has been all too much of a reality for members of New Zealand’s Muslim community, especially in the years before the Christchurch mosque massacre recast Muslims not as terror suspects, but the victims of terrorist violence.
“We wanted to tell a story about what it was like being a Muslim here over the past couple of years, but especially in the period of time before 2019 and before March 15,” says Hassan. “There was a lot of work that I had done as a journalist with regards to what was going on in that community [concerning] counterterrorism policies and surveillance measures and how they impacted people’s lives.”
Hassan’s RNZ podcast series on that issue, Public Enemy, won him a Gold Trophy at the New York Radio Awards, but nonetheless, he says, “I feel like that story has been lost, that there hasn’t been an opportunity for us to really examine what that period of time was like for Muslims and how much unnecessary chaos was caused in people’s lives and communities, inside mosques, as a result of something that inevitably didn’t really achieve anything from a policy perspective.
“At the same time, we wanted to tell a story that brought to light all of these characters that we’ve grown up with, in all of their light, and their colour and their quirks, and show this community, which was chaotic and empathetic and emotional and paranoid and loving and a lot of different things. That is the place that we came from.”
Hassan worked on the scripts with his producer, Somali-born Ahmed Osman, “brainstorming stories we had heard and stories that we brought from our own experiences”, for more than a year before they took it to Gibson Group to make for television. When it got to the stage of assembling a cast and crew, he says, “We tried as much as possible to find people who were from our communities, or who had a familiarity or an attachment to these communities.”
Which didn’t necessarily mean they’d grown up in the culture. Arlo Green is of Middle Eastern heritage but had little contact with the Muslim world growing up. When the decision was made to film at the real Kelston Mosque in Auckland, rather than build a set, it was new ground for him.
“Same for me,” says series director Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, who has been an actor and director on Shortland Street and contributed to the anthology film Kāinga. “I’m not a practising Muslim. I have filmed in a mosque before, but we were in the men’s side, which meant that we had to wear a hijab, because you’re still in a place that requires a certain type of respect. So, that was interesting in itself. But I think, for me, it was interesting because I have never really been to mosques.”
Green and Afuni, who knew each other from working together on the Jules Verne-inspired Disney series Nautilus, flatted together for the production and Roxie Mohebbi, who plays the level-headed civil servant Marwa, later moved in, too.
“It allowed them to find that bond,” says Golbakhsh. “They’d come on set excited and happy and be like, ‘Hey, we tried this last night, what do you think?’ So, they’d done half the job before they even got to set. Obviously, it’s Mohamed’s story, but the people involved could relate to it on a very personal level. Marwa is a hijabi girl and our actress isn’t hijabi and I’m not hijabi, but one of our make-up women is, so having her there talking through the nuances of how one wears it and our relationship with it, that was really important. Maybe that’s it; maybe it’s just having the right people tell the right story.”
Hassan, who was effectively not just writer but showrunner on Miles from Nowhere, has long used humour to talk about things that might otherwise be a cause for anger, but the show was his first taste of TV, let alone TV comedy.
His work as a poet offered “a great way for me to think about brevity and economy and tone” for the screen, he says. It was also the reason that his friend and mentor Dominic Hoey gets a cameo in a scene at an open-mic night at a bar, which Hassan describes as “kind of an ode, not only to the spaces that I started performing poetry, but also to the poetry community itself”.
The extras in that scene are the friends he came to after walking away from an engineering degree he hated and making “the difficult decision” to change course into poetry and then journalism. His parents, he says, were horrified at “these things that in their eyes were very uncertain, very unfamiliar.”
Miles from Nowhere has already screened at the Red Sea International Film Festival, where it earned notices in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, as well as a review that dubbed it “a sweet little comedy about some rather unsavoury topics”.
The six-part show isn’t on its own in the world: the BBC has delivered four seasons of Guz Khan’s Man Like Mobeen, a gritty comedy about a former drug dealer trying to be a good Muslim, and this year will see a second season of We Are Lady Parts, the hit series about an all-female Muslim punk band. The CBC comedy series Sort Of is the soulful story of a gender-fluid Pakistani-Canadian. They all, in one way or another, touch on the idea of being a good Muslim in a complicated world.
Miles from Nowhere seems likely to reach similar audiences. German screen distributor Red Arrow has picked up global rights and the team has already begun work on a second season. For now, though, 35-year-old Hassan is still a working journalist, covering the Middle East and the war in Gaza.
There are also other TV ideas in development and they aren’t necessarily comedies.
“I am kind of a dramatic writer who is pretending to be a comedic writer and there’s a lot of exploring those two tones in the show. But there’s stories that we want to tell that can only be told from the lens of drama. And at the same time, you know, we love doing comedy and there’s a real magic to comedy that I’m certainly not ready to let go of any time soon.”
Miles from Nowhere launches on Sky Open at 8.30pm on Wednesday, February 21.
