Sometimes the smallest projects are the most interesting. That may well be the case for Riz Ahmed’s newest film: a 16-minute short called Dammi, directed by Yann Demange, of Top Boy and ’71 renown, which is receiving an unusually high-profile release on the streaming platform Mubi.
Partly it is because Ahmed is now a bona fide Hollywood figure after films such as Sound of Metal, Nimona and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story – having cut his teeth in indie British cinema, with credits including Shifty, Four Lions and Trishna. But Ahmed is also something of a overachiever with short films; along with director Aneil Karia, he won an Oscar for The Long Goodbye, a hard-hitting short about a British Asian family brutalised by neo-Nazi paramilitaries, and inspired by his own album of the same name.
