VENICE, Italy – A powerful new film chronicles the life of an Ethiopian intellectual who flees his country during the Marxist “red terror” in the 1980s, only to be viciously attacked in Germany by racist youths.
Anberber, the central character, returns to his homeland longing for peace, but life with his mother in a small village is disrupted by armed factions dragging boys away to fight and by prying locals wary of a man they consider to be an outsider.
“Teza,” by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, is one of 21 movies in competition at the Venice film festival, and warm applause after a press screening suggested it would be a contender for prizes at the closing ceremony on Saturday.
The story jumps between multiple timelines, but in each Anberber struggles to fit in, be it in his native Ethiopia or in exile in Germany.
Gerima said “Teza” reflected his own experiences, and was based on a recurring dream.
“The dream is basically about intellectual displacement,” he told reporters in Venice on Tuesday.
“When I translated my dream it was about being displaced, unable to live up to your peasant life, your peasant family and at the same time reconcile (that) with your modern world.”
Anberber seeks refuge in memories of his happy childhood, something U.S.-based Gerima said he also did whenever he returned to Ethiopia which he described as “a nightmare for me.”
“Like Anberber in the film I like to drown (in) the past.”
“I go to Ethiopia and I dream my past but the present is so powerful it continues to hijack my sentimental journey to my childhood. I think it’s the idea that you want your childhood world to come back, I think that is universal.”
“In Africa the luxury to remember memory is hijacked by daily violence, either silent violence or obvious violence.”
DEATH AND DANGER
Some of the most striking scenes are set in the 1980s, with Ethiopia in the grip of purges, show trials, executions and mob lynchings under the leadership of Mengistu Haile Mariam, who seized power in 1974 after Emperor Haile Selassie’s overthrow.
Giant portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin form the backdrop to the violence and fear, and Anberber’s revolutionary fervor quickly turns to disillusionment as he realizes what the regime means for himself and his country.
Actor Abeye Tedla, who plays Anberber’s best friend and fellow idealist, recalled some of the horrors of that time which he lived through as a child.
“I’ve seen a few bodies when I was going to school and coming back. It wasn’t uncommon.”
“As you were walking by there would be a guard standing there so nobody removes the body. And if you look too closely … the person would say ‘Do you know this person?’ And I mean literally you could get shot if the person suspected you.”
He praised Gerima for what he said was a balanced portrayal of those times in Ethiopia.
“It (the story) just looks at what happens when people stop thinking constructively and start thinking destructively.”
“Teza” revisits Ethiopia under Mengistu at Venice filmfest
VENICE, Italy (AFP) – Mengistu’s blood-drenched Ethiopia was the backdrop in Venice on Tuesday for filmmaker Haile Gerima’s “Teza,” his attempt to reconcile an idyllic childhood with modern realities.
“I dream my past, but the present is so powerful that it continues to hijack my sentimental journey to my childhood,” Gerima told a news conference.
In the film, Aron Arefe plays Anberber, an idealistic Ethiopian intellectual who studies medicine in Germany, then returns to his home village under Haile Mariam Mengistu’s brutal 1970s-80s regime.
Unable to put his expertise to good use, Anberber also faces an identity crisis arising from his “displacement between the village and the modern world,” said Gerima, who won a lifetime achievement award at the Washington Independent Film Festival in 2003.
“Contemporary reality continues to interfere, with silent violence as well as obvious violence,” he added.
A central challenge was harnessing the wealth inherited from generations of oral tradition, Gerima said, calling handed-down stories “our monuments.”
“My grandmother told stories around the fire. My father was a playwright. How do you reconcile that tradition with filmmaking? How is the form culminating my personal identity?” he asked.
“Teza” is one of two African films in the selection of 21 vying for the coveted Golden Lion here, along with “Gabbla” by Algeria’s Tariq Teguia, set in the north African country as it emerged from its civil war of the 1990s.
Also Tuesday, Russian director Aleksei German jr. presented “Paper Soldier,” a recreation of the Soviet effort to put the first man in space in 1961 — Yuri Gagarin — centring on the cosmonaut squad’s chief doctor.
Set mainly in desolate Kazakhstan but far from the high-tech control centre and launchpad, the film shows behind-the-scenes hardships and follies, becoming a parable of Soviet nationalism while unmasking a yearning for a grander past.
“The movie is about the generation of my parents, their idealism, about how the times have dramatically changed,” said Merab Ninidze, who plays the doctor.
“They had their poetry, books, everything connecting them to the past, a paradise kind of lost,” he said.
A third film on Tuesday, “set in no particular time or place,” according to German director Werner Schroeter, shows “the destruction of a society where utopia is not possible.”
The hero, a doctor and potential political leader played by Pascal Greggory, “wants to be honest in a society where you cannot be honest,” Schroeter said.
The action, full of brutality, is in a city being terrorised by a violent militia, opposed by rival factions.
Gilles Taurand, who wrote the screenplay alongside Schroeter drawing from a novel by Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti, said it was a Kafkaesque search “for the meaning of life.”
After more than half the films in competition have been screened ahead of the prize ceremony on Saturday, two have emerged as front-runners in the Italian press, and they are both Japanese.
They are Takeshi Kitano’s whimsical “Achilles and the Tortoise” and Hayao Miyazaki’s latest animated children’s fantasy “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.”
