What happens to the wives or girlfriends of gangsters? In film we see them making pasta, looking after children, held for ransom or shot. Cinema usually use them to create a tension between what they represent and what gangsters do. TOMMY is unusual in making the wife/girlfriend the protagonist. He’s already dead as the film starts. Estelle (Moa Gammel) has come home to Sweden to collect his share of the money from a bank heist that netted 4 million euros so she and her daughter can start a new life. But in order to do so, gangland must not know the man they fear is dead.

I was glad to see the film – a combination of noir and maternal melodrama – so clearly focussed on women: wives, daughters, sisters, mothers. The Cairo Trilogy with its focus on power and corruption has little place for women. We see particular types — femme fatales, wives, too-young women impregnated by too-old Imams — and briefly. It didn’t bother me per se but I noted it had the potential to. This film – Saleh’s first live-action feature and second film (METROPIA, his first feature, is an animated film) – is a corrective.

This is also the first film of his I’ve seen that is set in his native Sweden – Saleh is the progeny of an Egyptian and a Swede who grew up there – and it’s further proof that who makes movies matters. His Sweden is full of people of colour — Turks, blacks, Middle-Easterners — and he’s aware of the tensions between migration and place. There’s a lovely scene at the beginning when our heroine is held by immigration – her husband is wanted for robbery – and the way it’s filmed and edited – the pale blonde faces of our heroine and her daughter in a sea of brown – shots of a young dark-skinned boy looking on that is held just a beat too long that so well communicates that what is happening is the rule for the dark-skinned people and alarmingly exceptional for the likes of her.