Who is she?
Nargis Ahmad isn’t an actress, and she’ll tell you so herself: “I have bigger fishes to fry,” she says over the phone from Ottawa, where she’s employed as a case coordinator for Ontario Works. She also works weekends at a shelter for battered women. Nevertheless, Ahmad gives a strong, finely detailed performance in Montreal filmmaker Helene Klodawsky’s verité-styled drama Family Motel, in which she plays a Somali woman struggling to support her two daughters after they’re evicted from their Ottawa apartment.

Turns out it’s a role close to Ahmad’s personal and professional experiences. How did the sudden acting job come about?
Ahmad was approached about Family Motel by the film’s creative consultant, Hadan Mohamed, whom she’d met a few years earlier at a local community centre. “She called my office and told me that she was from Instinct Films and that these filmmakers from Montreal were looking for people to be in a movie about immigrant struggles,” says Ahmad. “I said ‘Excuse me, who are you and who put you up to this? I don’t have time for jokes. I’m working.’”

But less than a week later, Ahmad and her daughters Asha and Sagal were auditioning for the production. “I thought that maybe I could get one or two things that were important to me into the film,” she says. “And for my children, it was an adventure. They could do the movie in the summer and go back to school in the fall.”

One thing Ahmad wasn’t prepared for: Klodawsky’s improvisational approach.  
“I watch enough television to know that they use scripts.” But she overcame her apprehension, and the best moments in Family Motel resonate with lived-in intensity. “I wasn’t where I am today when I got to Canada,” she says. “I never ended up living in a motel, but I started off without a home of my own. I lived in a shelter, and then I worked in a shelter. I drew from that, and of course from my own work experience and the experiences of people in our community.”

Ahmad’s familiarity with the film’s milieu cut both ways…
For all Family Motel’s moments of authenticity, Ahmad says that she’s not sure the movie goes far enough. “I thought it touched on important things, but that it could have showed an even harsher side to homelessness and suffering. That’s because I work in the system… I see more than even what [my character] goes through in the film.”

A wakeup call
At the same time, Ahmad knows and appreciates what the film will represent to some viewers. “When we showed it at MOMA in New York, the Americans were shocked that there are any problems at all with [Canada’s] social services,” she recalls. “And we do have wonderful social services, one of the best systems in the world. But internally, we can improve it. We should not have homeless families and children, shelters overflowing. If we compare ourselves to other parts of the world, we look good, but looking good isn’t enough.”