Ramla Ali’s Olympic story becomes the film In the Shadows

Ramla Ali became the first boxer in history to represent Somalia at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Her life now anchors In the Shadows, which premiered at a West End cinema with her husband and former coach Richard Moore and her mother in attendance.

Ali arrived in a frothy dress with cascading black feathers. Bear Grylls and Malala Yousafzai had left her phone messages from the audience. Her mother was watching for the fourth time. “She loves it,” Ali said.

Anthony Wonke directed the biographical film. Jasmine Jobson, the Top Boy actor, plays Ali; Letitia Wright had initially been attached to the project.

What does the film cover?

The film follows her family’s flight from Somalia through Kenya to the United Kingdom, her adoption of boxing in east London, and her qualification for the Tokyo Games.

Ali was born in Somalia. As a baby, she lost her older brother Abdulkadir, killed in an explosion while playing. Their family fled by boat to Kenya and arrived in the UK as refugees.

She took classes at a local gym after classmates bullied her about her weight. Ali said she trained seriously in secret, because boxing was not allowed for her as a Muslim girl. She feared her mother, who had escaped violence with the family, would be devastated. Today, she calls her mother first after a fight.

Why did the film test the family?

Moore, an executive producer, said they pitched the project in 2018 because they were broke. “We were down to our last hundred quid. We were lucky at that time, we had friends who took us in and housed us.” They stayed for a time in a home owned by Idris Elba and his wife, Sabrina. Ali called them “our saviours” and joked that Covid then extended their stay.

Ali doubted whether she wanted to be so vulnerable with a writer and expose experiences she had not shared. Her mother insisted that the film include Abdulkadir’s killing. Moore said the scene was a way of keeping his memory alive: “Remembering him, and making his death mean something bigger.”

Ali described her brother’s death as the cause of everything that followed: “His death is the ripple effect. If my brother hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have come to the UK. I wouldn’t have taken up boxing. I wouldn’t have met Richard. My life would be so different.”

What changes when a migrant story is told?

Ali said the film is not a pro-immigration statement. It offers another point of view to political claims about migrants arriving by boat and stealing British jobs. “It’s depicting a human migrant story,” she said. Ali argued that positive migrant stories rarely receive attention, although they represent people who build lives, families and careers here. The practical change is the lens: audiences encounter one family’s migration through a boxer who became the first to represent Somalia at the Olympics, not through a political category.

• In 2015, Ali became the first Muslim woman to win an English amateur boxing title.
• In 2018, she set up Sisters Club, a charity providing free boxing classes to vulnerable women.

She has modelled, appearing on the cover of British Vogue guest edited by the Duchess of Sussex, and serves as a Unicef ambassador.

What does Ali want after boxing?

Ali said she read every draft of the script, worked on set every day of the shoot and body doubled in the film’s boxing scenes. “Some exec producers just write their names on the film. But I worked for that title. I earned it.”

She and Moore have written and directed a comedy film, Not Like Us, and Ali has begun acting. Ali said boxing is not for ever and expects to leave the sport. She argued that its discipline will transfer to filmmaking.

She noted the volume of films made for Black people in America. “I would love to be able to be in a position to tell more stories focused on the Black British experience.”

How did Jobson prepare for the role?

Jobson’s preparation combined two weeks of intensive rehearsal with eight hours of daily training, physiotherapy for an old shoulder injury, and a serious effort to learn Somali.

She arrived at BFI Southbank with a publicist, a makeup artist and a hairdresser, crossing the room in Louboutin heels. She said: “There’s not one part of my team that can be missing.” She had trained in karate and kickboxing as a child, and described joining the film with little preparation: “Literally two weeks to become a champion.”

Jobson was not intimidated by playing a living person. The shoulder injury came from her college years, when she trained as a personal trainer and pulled too much weight down on a lat-pull. She said she had not continued boxing and needed to return to it.

Jobson said she fell for Ali over coffee, admiring how she had overcome so much and become an international success. She also drew a parallel between their lives: “It’s not that we’ve had the same life experiences, but we both had struggles and we both had a dream.”

Her own route to acting included recognition from her parents, social services involvement during secondary school, and a move to her grandmother’s home. At 14, she entered foster care. “I had to do a very very deep dive within myself and take myself away from bad crowds, and figure out what my destiny was,” she said.

A family friend suggested she try The Big House, a north London theatre company that works with care leavers. She got an agent there and learned Somali lines for the film. One phrase, she explained, meant: “I just want you to be proud of me.” She wanted that recognition for her family and everyone else.

For Ali, the next test is production: whether she can build on In the Shadows with the Black British stories she says she wants to tell.