Faya Dayi takes a hallucinatory look at Ethiopia’s khat crops, to November 24 at The Cinematheque
Poetic black-and-white imagery explores the intoxicating hold the green leaves have on a people
Boys harvest khat in the Ethiopian countryside in Faya Dadi.
The Cinematheque screens Faya Dayi until November 24.
MEXICAN-ETHIOPIAN director Jessica Beshir has made a documentary that both tells the story of khat, and also mimics its dazed, euphoric effects.
Shot in luminous black and white, the film takes a poetic look at Ethiopia’s biggest cash crop—the green leaves that, when chewed, act as a stimulant. Some use it for a spiritual, Sufist high; others—particularly the labourers who harvest khat—use it to escape the drudgery, poverty, and fallout of migration.
Faya Dayi feels like a long, languidly paced dream, full of artful imagery: children frolicking in a flooded field; a tendril of smoke spiralling in the air of a mud hut; gauzy veils blowing in the breeze. And then there is the endless rustling of the all-important leaves, backed by a chorus of insects, birds, and echoing calls to prayer. Beshir immerses us in a remote part of the world, surrounded by veiled women singing, crocheting, and stirring stew; old men blissing out in the shadows of a hut; boys lying on their backs in a field, dreaming of escaping to Saudi Arabia or Egypt. The camera hovers in extreme closeups of hands sorting leaves, tying twin around bundles, or fidgeting prayer beads.
Beshir fills the film with a sense of mysticism and longing; one boy misses the mother who left the country to work and never came back; another simply misses the father figure he's lost to the pull of khat. Expressed through elliptical imagery and words, Faya Dayi touches on political struggle and social injustice. But it's not so much a direct indictment of the hold the green leaves have on a country and its people, but a melancholic dream of yearning and escape.
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