Mahdi Ahmed

One of the most rewarding experiences as a screenwriter is when a simple motif quietly transforms into the heartbeat of a story. In Kan’bulo, that motif was the shell.

The shell begins its journey as a tender gesture — Ariz gifting half of it to Kan’bulo. On the surface, it feels like a token of affection, but beneath that lies a symbol of incompleteness, of two halves belonging together. It’s fragile, ordinary even, yet it carries the weight of connection and hope.

The true resonance of the shell revealed itself in the crucial scene where Kan’bulo, utterly broken and stripped of all hope, decides to throw away her half into the sea — as if to surrender everything she has left. On paper, this was the perfect place for dialogue, the kind of moment where one could write pages of desperate exchanges. But instead, I chose silence.

From a screenwriting perspective, this was an intentional technical decision. I let the motif do the storytelling. In screenwriting, dialogue often competes with action, but when a motif is planted and nurtured throughout the narrative, it earns the right to replace words. The act of Ariz stopping her hand and placing his half-shell over hers became a complete scene arc: setup (the decision to throw), conflict (his intervention), and resolution (the joining of the halves). No words needed.

The result was powerful. In the theatre that night, silence extended beyond the screen — the audience, too, fell into complete stillness. You could feel them breathing with Kan’bulo, watching two halves become whole. That shared silence was not emptiness but resonance. It was cinema at its purest: visual storytelling carrying emotion more strongly than dialogue ever could.

For me, that moment alone made the journey of writing Kan’bulo worthwhile. The shell was no longer just a prop — it became the soul of the film, binding the characters and the audience in one collective heartbeat. Sometimes, it is in the absence of words that cinema finds its truest voice.

Kan’bulo is currently enjoying a successful run at Olympus.