Cinema
Deluge
Ye Wonz Maibel
Salem Mekuria · 1997
Synopsis
Back in Ethiopia, the filmmaker retraces the disappearance of her younger brother and the execution of her best friend, swept away in the years that followed the students' revolution. A personal meditation on history, the film follows the ideal of that generation, its triumph and then its engulfment in a military dictatorship, and questions each person's share in a country's tragedies: what drives people to love or to destroy, what turns nobility into cowardice and dream into nightmare.
Context
The film was shot in Ethiopia and production ran from 1991 to 1995. It lasts sixty-one minutes and was shot on sixteen-millimetre film. The director wrote the text, produced it and shot part of the footage, with Mark Gunning on camera and Eric Neudel and Dan Nutu on editing. Release dates vary according to the sources, from 1995 to 1997. The British channel Channel Four broadcast it in 1997, and South African public television in 2000.
Who it is for
A one-hour film, narrated in the first person. The Red Terror refers to the campaign of elimination that the Derg waged against its opponents on the left.
Prizes and reception
It is among the first films devoted to this period, and academic work on African diaspora cinema takes it as a subject.