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| View of Addis Ababa, seen as the seat of enlightenment in a new Ethiopian film (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
With the venerable (42-year-old) Festival du Nouveau
Cinema underway in Montreal, screening 30 films a day with a total of more than
430 entrants, I have so far managed to see two films, from Spain and Ethiopia,
both of which have dealt with the problems in the modern world of young women.
In my opinion, the Ethiopian film, Difret,(the
word means Courage, or To Dare, but can also mean Rape) only the fourth film from that country ever to be shot in 35 mm,
is an exceptionally gut-wrenching drama, acted with impressive authenticity by
a team of what seems to be largely unprofessional actors, and one which
provides a model for any film dealing with a particular incident in that it
keeps its focus from beginning to end on the incident in question. Director
Zeresenay Berhane Mehari has not devoted a shot or sequence that seems to be irrelevant to the telling of his story, and
the force with which its dialogue is expressed builds up a nightmarish
situation in which a young woman is trapped by what appears to be an ancient,
and very troubling tradition.
A 14-year-old girl, Hirut,
walking home from her school, where she has just been promoted to a higher
grade, is surrounded by a group of violent young horsemen, who kidnap her, take
her to a house where they beat and rape her, and where her main attacker claims
to be in the process of finding a wife by the method --- abduction --- that is
traditional in their community.
The girl, of course, is terrified
by what has happened to her, but, when her tormentor is suddenly called away,
and leaves his rifle behind, she has the courage to seize the rifle and run
away. She is chased, and when her captors catch her she carries out her threat
and shoots her attacker and prospective husband dead. This is a crime
punishable in the local morality only with death, and when Hirut is handed over
to police and the local District
Attorney, her prospects for survival seem even more remote, as each of them shows themselves to be completely
accepting of the traditional mores.
A volunteer group of women lawyers
in Addis Ababa hears of the case, and one of them, played with riveting
intensity by a well-known Ethiopian actress, Meron Getnet. turns up as counsel
for the defence, but her application to pay the girl’s bail is rejected,
because, the police sergeant says, “this girl is not going to get bail,” or
words to that effect. But, says the lawyer,
that is the law, and if there is a law, it has to be administered. The
lawyer has to retreat, but she gets in touch with an elderly retired man of her
acquaintance who has been a judge, and he agrees to intervene and ensure the
girl is at least given bail.
The girl has two trials to
undergo: the first is that of the village elders, shown with an amazingly
concentrated ferocity as they meet under a tree, and come to the conclusion to
delay application of the traditional death penalty, since the girl is now in
police hands and facing a legal trial. Hirut’s elder sister had been a
promising runner, but she had been abducted in exactly this way, and had become
the wife of a drunk, with four children binding her to the traditional feminine
role of household drudge. The lawyer discovers that Hirut’s younger sister, following
Hirut’s abduction, has been withdrawn from school so that she could look after
the animals and help with the farmwork. The lawyer has to obtain the father’s
signature before she can get any authority in the case, but the father can
neither read nor write, and there is an affecting scene where he agrees to sign
with his thumbprint.
In an effort to help her young
sister the girl runs away, but is caught by the police and returned before a
howling mob of traditionalists braying for her death. Meantime, much to the
dismay of her supporters, the woman lawyer, having been rebuffed by a lower
court, decides to sue the Minister for Justice, who promptly disbars the
association of women lawyers, and declares that the young woman no longer has
authority to represent the victim.
The story comes to a happy
conclusion: it is apparently based on a true story, one in which a similar case
led to a change in the law in Ethiopia, banning abduction in these
circumstances.
The film effectively uses the
contrast between the city, seat of education and at least moderate enlightenment,
and the hard-pressed countryside, full of impoverished and uneducated and
tradition-bound farmers. The film’s story is as much about the battle for
justice waged by the women lawyers as by the fight to free this young kid. I
found that this film in the Amharic language of the country (which, on this
evidence, seems to be a forceful and dynamic language) has an astonishing intensity that never lifts from the first
moments to the last. It is one of the candidates for next year’s Academy
Awards, for which 83 countries have submitted films in the foreign language
category. I would say this film must
have a chance of becoming at least one of the nine finalists, to be chosen in
January. It is certainly much better than Canada’s entry, Mommy, by Quebec wunderkind Xavier Dolan.
The second film I have seen so
far is called Hermosa Juventud (Beautiful
Youth) a bittersweet Spanish film by director Jaime Rosales, about a young
couple, lacking significant education, trapped by the recent desperate state of
the Spanish economy, who can think of only one way to get some money, which is
to collaborate in appearing in a pornographic film. Their state of mind is
something that seems to be typical of youths of this sort almost everywhere
these days --- aimless, disinterested in anything much, drifting, unemployed
and virtually unemployable, and without the moral fibre or understanding of
themselves, or the resources, to pull
themselves up, as it were, by their bootstraps. Eventually the girl gets
pregnant, and decides to keep the child, who becomes at once their most prized
possession, and a weight around their neck that further diminishes their
prospects in life. The girl decides she will leave her husband and child to try
her luck in Germany, where she is shown to have no more luck than in the
beginning of the film. This is a less involving film, perhaps because one’s
sympathy for this aimless couple is somewhat attenuated, and the telling of the
tale in no way matches the intensity shown in the Ethiopian film.
Still, these two films, taken
together constitute a powerful indictment of how capitalism in these days of
inequality is failing to provide the good life that used to be promised for the
future that is now upon us.
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