An Ethiopian micro-budget fantasy set during the war with Italy in the 1930s? When I saw the description in the LFF guide, I thought I had to go. It's the sort of thing you'll only see at a festival, and the whole thing sounded so intriguing: a young girl called Beti travels to her grandfather's house to flee the fighting. There she happens upon a visitor from another world, who she calls Amare. Together they try to survive alone in a world of dangers.
I mean, who on earth would come up with that idea?
Well, the answer became slightly clearer once the writer/director took to the stage as the credits rolled. Andy Siege is the son of German aid workers and grew up moving around Africa listening to local stories. He wanted to make a film inspired by African legends of shape shifting monsters, but blended with Western sci-fi traditions.
Unfortunately, this genre-bending didn't really work, and if I hadn't stayed for the Q&A afterwards, I would have just been incredibly confused. Not much happens over the course of the film - mostly Beti walks back and forth to a watering hole through the stunning grasslands of Ethiopia. When things do happen, they are very strange, sudden and never explained. Amare's origin and intentions are kept deliberately very mysterious. Is he real or a figment of Beti's imagination?
This is a film where it is best to just relax, take in the general mood of the piece, and then marvel at how it could have been made for €14,000. The landscape is beautiful and well shot. Siege has chosen to mix colour with black-and-white footage, sometimes flitting between the two within a few seconds, and sometimes picking out just one colour in a sea of grey. Although intermittently effective, I personally found this technique distracting and over-used. The special effects were understandably ropey, but to the film's credit there was no attempt to make them seem realistic.
The main positive in the whole film is the central performance from Hiwot Asres. With very little dialogue she manages to convey a lot of different emotions and you do really care about what happens to her.
For the budget, this is a very impressive debut from Siege. But dialogue and plot cost nothing, and I would have preferred a little bit more of that to help keep me engaged rather than a sort of meditative tone poem. When it comes to micro-budget films, I might be more of a Clerks person than a Beti and Amare person.
Still, I can tell people that I've seen an Ethiopian sci-fi film.
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