It’s a TV series about NZ Muslims under SIS surveillance - and it’s a comedy
Serious laughs: Miles from Nowhere stars Arlo Green (pictured) and was inspired, says creator Mohamed Hassan, by the desire to tell a story about what it's been like being a Muslim in New Zealand during the past couple of years. Photo / Supplied
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.”