Also showing:
Wed, Oct 13 | 2 pm | FH
Fri, Oct 15 | 10 :00 am – 11:59 pm | Virtual
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)
Tickets are on sale now for Members and Pass purchasers and will be on sale to individual ticket purchasers at 10am, Wednesday, September 29.
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.