AFI New Africa ’24: Melody of Love

Ethiopia is not just the home of great Highlife musicians and Ethiopiques. Addis Ababa also has a hip and thriving jazz scene. Ironically, Michael, jazz guitarist (and amateur Michael Jackson impersonator) is just starting to catch on there. He has been playing real-life venues like the Africa Jazz Village (Ghion Hotel) and Sounds Jazz Club, with musicians like Mulatu Astatke (who plays himself). Unfortunately, Michael’s mother insists he join her and his sister in Belgium, even though he has zero prospects there. Dutifully, Michael will make his sad goodbyes throughout Edmundo Bejarano’s Melody of Love, which screens during the AFI’s 2024 New Africa Film Festival.

Honestly, Melody of Love has some of the best incidental and background music of any film screening anywhere this month. Michael is sitting in with some very talented cats, most definitely including Astatke. He also has great friends, like Pollock, a fellow musician, and his romance with Melody is seriously heating up—like steamily so. Yet, his mother says come, so he will obediently go.

He knows this is the wrong thing to do and we the viewers know it is the wrong thing to do, but he does it anyway. Why, colonialism. Seriously, Melody of Love has been described as a “meditation on the internalized weight of colonialism.” Yet, it seems more like a cautionary argument against immigrating from the only home you have ever known to a foreign country, where you no connections or work waiting for you. That might sound like an overly simplified reading, but it is one audiences can reach from a self-contained viewing, rather than supplementing the film with ersatz Frantz Fanon-style commentary.

Crumbs: Allegorical Ethiopian Science Fiction

Eventually, your Michael Jackson records will finally be worth something on the collectors market. You will just have to survive at least one apocalypse, maybe two. This post-post-apocalyptic Ethiopia might look like a strange land to us, but the diminutive, stoop-shouldered Candy is not particular comfortable with it either in Miguel Llansó’s evocative DIY SF minimalist epic Crumbs (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

This is a post-industrial, post-everything world, but there are still flashes of power thanks to occasional electromagnetic pulses emanating from the dead-or-hibernating space craft hovering overhead. It happens quite frequently in the abandoned bowling alley, where Candy lives with his beloved Birdy. He is convinced the hulking mothership is rebooting and will soon be leaving for its home planet. Candy wants a seat on that flight, so he will embark on a cross-country quest to find the man who can fulfill his wish: Santa Claus.

It is easy to get distracted by Llansó’s clever cultural anachronisms, like Candy’s talisman, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurine and the Michel Jordan altar Birdy worships at. However, Crumbs is thoroughly marinated in Joseph Campbell. It is absolutely a hero’s journey in the Pilgrim’s Progress tradition. Sometimes it does not make ironclad logical sense, but the background for Candy’s quest is truly stunning. Although it was shot in the Northern Ethiopian ghost town of Dallol and the surrounding terrain of salt marshes and lava formations, Llansó could claim he filmed on Mars and most people would believe him.

Despite his delicate appearance, Daniel Tadesse is a powerful presence as Candy. He is an everyman’s underdog, yet he forges some acutely sensitive romantic chemistry with Selam Tesfaye’s Birdy. Frankly, it is pretty impressive they can withstand Llansó’s awesomely surreal visuals.

Even at its economical sixty-minute running time, Crumbs’ narrative still manages to get confusingly oblique at times. However, the fantastical dreamscapes (dramatically framed by cinematographer Israel Seooane) and Tadesse’s quiet intensity always hold our attention. It might be premature to herald the golden age of Ethiopian science fiction, but Crumbs and Andy Siege’s Beti and Amare suggest there is a promising genre zeitgeist brewing there. Recommended for fans of Jodorowsky and Tarkovsky, Crumbs opens today (10/23) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

PSIFF ’15: Beti and Amare

Amare is sort of like Jeff Bridges’ Starman, except he has a prominent set of fangs. He just might need that chomping power. Of all the places he could fall to Earth, he finds himself in Ethiopia during the 1936 Italian invasion. Fortunately, he will soon meet a terrestrial guide to learn from and perhaps protect in Andy Siege’s fable-like Beti and Amare (trailer here), which screens during the 2015 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

Beti has already been brutalized by the war, but she is not talking about it. Her mother sent her to stay with the grandfather she hardly knows, believing she will be safer in the remote desert. However, the area is patrolled by a trio of self-proclaimed “protectors,” whose like Beti has ruefully seen before. They definitely take notice of her too, making her highly vulnerable when her grandfather must leave to buy new livestock.

Thanks to some quick thinking, Beti is able to temporarily forestall the dubious militia men. Into this tense environment lands an egg with a passenger inside, like Mork from Ork, but the visitor Beti names Amare has the consciousness of a child. At least he is a quick learner, instinctively resourceful, and sports a mean set of canines. Confrontation is obviously inevitable, especially when an Italian soldier stumbles into the film.

Reportedly produced on a $7,000 budget, B & A is an admirably scrappy little film. Granted, Siege’s Spartan aesthetic and minimalist desert locale make virtues of necessities, but bringing in a period science fiction film for less the five figures is impressive any way you slice it. Just imagine what he could do with an extra grand. Clearly, he has a passion and talent for filmmaking (and he is credibly intense and loathsome playing the Italian), but it would not kill anyone if he picked up the pace a little in his next film.

So maybe there is a little bit of slack in B & A. Regardless, Hiwot Asres performance as Beti is remarkably brave and honest. Siege also has an amazing eye for visual composition, mixing black-and-white with color for striking effect. He even stages bizarrely stylized dream sequences that look like the product of Georges Méliès on an acid trip.

Admittedly, B & A is a little rough around the edges, but Siege’s execution is so strangely distinctive, he earns the benefit of the doubt. After all, it is about as underdog a film as you are likely to see at a major festival. Recommended for those looking for something different, Beti and Amare screens this Friday (1/9) and next Sunday (1/11), as part of this year’s PSIFF.

BFF ’11: The Athlete

Abebe Bikila scored yet another first for his country when his cinematic life story became the first Ethiopian film submitted for best foreign language Academy Award consideration last year, thirty seven years after his death. An iconic Olympic medalist, Bikila’s short but remarkable life is stirringly dramatized in Davey Frankel & Rasselas Lakew’s The Athlete (trailer here), which screens during the 2011 Brooklyn Film Festival.

The significance of an Ethiopian winning the marathon (barefoot, no less) at the 1960 Rome Games was hard to miss. Bikila’s gold was the first won by an Olympian from both his country and the entire continent of Africa. Four years later, he became the first athlete from anywhere to win back-to-back marathon gold. However, the 1968 games in Mexico were considered something of a debacle for Bikila. Then disaster truly struck.

Throughout Athlete, the audience sees Bikila’s triumphs in flashbacks, while watching the Olympian deal with the tribulations of 1969. At first, it just seems to be the case of an athlete struggling to come to terms with the impending end of his career. Unfortunately, an auto accident renders Bikila quadriplegic. While treatment in Britain restored the use of his arms, Bikila clearly would never run another marathon. Yet, he would indeed find other outlets for his competitive drive.

Athlete follows sports movie conventions up to a point, but it presents a particularly complex and intriguing coach-and-athlete relationship. A Finnish expat by way of Sweden, Onni Niskanen was once active in the Finnish resistance to the Soviet invasion. Arguably, Athlete offers more back-story for Niskanen (altering it a bit for dramatic purposes) than for Bikila. Yet, this is rather by design, to emphasize the solitary nature of the Ethiopian long distance runner.

Though he is not exactly a dead ringer for the Bikila we see in the Olympic broadcast video (nicely integrated by co-editors Frankel and Matt Mayer), co-director Lakew is appropriately intense as the titular athlete. In a finely tuned performance, Swedish character actor Dag Malmberg brings a genuinely human dimension to Niskanen. Likewise, Ruta Gedmintas (lately seen in The Borgias) has some surprisingly memorable moments as his English nurse Charlotte.

Though Athlete’s conclusion is unabashedly manipulative, it is also well executed, so even cynical audiences will find themselves caught up in the swelling sentiment. Frankly, this is how sports movies are supposed to work. A real crowd pleaser (wrapping-up well before the horrors of the Marxist Mengistu regime), Athlete screens again during BFF next Sunday (6/12) at the Brooklyn Height Cinema.