Out of Ethiopia: how film- makers deal with the weight of memory

It is a truism that – agitprop and
now tribunal plays aside – it takes 
quite some time for traumatic events,personal or political, to filter into a culture. Distance is key,time is 
healing, for perspective,for the discovery of an appropriateidiom. 
A few years, at least; 10 years. A
lifetime.

But how much more complicated, how much slower the process, when it is combined with immigration across continents and languages. There are so often such great wounds – if the trauma was enough to cause people toflee across borders, leave family and friends,
survive refugee camps, then healing will be a slow business. Add that to the basic facts of getting by: a new culture, a new language, the subsidiary damage of suddenly being stripped of social status and starting again from the bottom of the
heap.


And of all cultural media, film, I’d argue, is probably the slowest of all. Poetry requires only paper and pen, or a laptop. Ditto fiction. Music is a moveable feast. Theater is a tad more complicated, but even that can be quickly scrabbled together . But film, even cheap film, requires serious cash, serious organization, specialized equipment and technological skills. And all that emotion recollected in tranquility as well, of course.

No surprise, then, that Yemane I
Demissie’s film Dead Weight , which
premiered at the Black Film-maker
international film festival in London in 2009, is one of only a small handful of feature films just now being produced by Ethiopians for an Ethiopian diaspora that began flocking to the west after 1974 (the year Emperor Haile Selassie I was deposed by the army) and particularly after the Red Terror of 1977-78 when, according to Amnesty International, up to 500,000 people were executed. (Others
are Rasselas Lakew’s The Athlete, which was shown as a "Best of the Fest" selection at Edinburgh, and
Haile Gerima’s Teza , which was awarded the Special Jury prize at the Venice film festival in 2008.)

Dead Weight, written by Blaine Sergew and directed by Demissie, explores the way in which leaving – for America, in this case, as so many did – may ensure survival and a new beginning, but not a clean slate. Based on the true tale of an Ethiopian woman who encountered a former torturer in Atlanta, Georgia, it tells the story of Hewan, who has made the archetypal immigrant’s success of her life: a good job as a dentist, a nice house,a daughter. And then she is introduced to a man she recognizes from Ethiopia –from when she was 15 and in prison,
simply for being the daughter of a
member of Haile Selassie’s cabinet. He made a specialty of torture with fire.(Demissie, incidentally, had a second film in this festival, a documentary, Twilight Revelations, that traces the emperor’s revolutionary education policies.) The film is low-key, careful, not flashy in a way that belies the bravery of poking at these wounds. No one comes out shiny, or always right. But there is plenty of sadness to go round.