Directed by Jessica Beshir
Ethiopia | 2020 | Documentary | 118 min | Amharic/Harari/Oromiffa w/ subtitles
Film Source: Janus Films
Sponsors: Penny Cluse Cafe
Virtual available
Hot Docs (Winner: Audience Award); Visions du Réel (Winner: Grand Jury Prize, FIPRESCI Award); Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (Winner: Grand Jury Award, Filmmaker Award, Emerging Artist Award)
In her hypnotic documentary feature, Ethiopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents. Though a deeply personal project — Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar with her family as a teenager due to growing political strife — she returned to make a film about the city, its rural Oromo community of farmers, and the harvesting of the country’s most sought-after export, Khat, a leaf Sufi Muslims chewed for centuries for religious meditations, and Ethiopia's most lucrative cash crop today. The film is neither a straightforward work of nostalgia nor an issue-oriented doc about a particular drug culture. Rather, Beshir has constructed something dreamlike: a film that uses light, texture, and sound to illuminate the spiritual lives of people whose experiences often become fodder for ripped-from-the-headlines tales of migration.