Black Europe Film Festival

6:00 PM Closing Reception · 7:15 PM Screening

A new generation of Ethiopian and Ethiopian American filmmakers is making waves—earning international recognition and critical acclaim for bold, innovative work that expands what cinema can look and feel like. The second edition of the Black Europe Film Festival closes with a special event celebrating their talent, imagination, and stories, bringing audiences into worlds shaped by memory, spirituality, place, and transformation.

ABOUT THE FILMS

THE RIVER | dir. Herrana Addisu | 2024 | Ethiopia | Amharic | Experimental documentary (short) | 18 min

The River is an award-winning, intimate, poetic short that explores women’s lived experiences in Ethiopia through tradition, memory, and resilience. Set to the rhythms of daily life along the riverbanks, the film follows a young woman navigating inherited customs, forced marriage, and gender-based violence. Water becomes both literal and symbolic: a source of beauty and sustenance, but also a burden that captures the tension between survival and sacrifice. A Qene Films production, the project was created with support from the SheaMoisture Blueprint Grant.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Director: Herrana Addisu is an award-winning film director, multidisciplinary artist, and social impact strategist passionate about using storytelling to drive systemic change. She is the founder of Chucha Studios. Her work has screened internationally and engages questions of human rights, gender justice, and advocacy.

ALAZAR | dir. Beza Hailu Lemma | 2024 | Ethiopia / France / Canada | Amharic | Fiction (short) | 35 min

In contemporary Ethiopia, a farming community’s exodus is shaken when the patriarch of a prominent family disappears from his grave. His son, Tessema, refuses the church’s divine explanation and launches his own search for answers. As suspicion spreads and certainties collapse, Alazar becomes a tense, atmospheric short that probes belief, authority, and the fragile line between the sacred and the real.

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR

Director: Beza Hailu Lemma is a writer/director based in Addis Ababa whose work moves between documentary and fiction. His films include Ballad of the Spirits (2016), Katanga Nation (2022), and Alazar(2024). Katanga Nation screened internationally, winning the Silver Foal for Best Documentary Short Film. He has participated in Berlinale Talents, L’Atelier (Cannes), and TIFF Filmmakers Lab.

FERENJ: A GRAPHIC MEMOIR IN VR | dir. Ainslee Alem Robson | 2020 | USA | English / Amharic | Experimental Documentary (short) | 9 min FERENJ is a visual dialogue between memory, reality, and the digital, in an afrosurreal dreamscape crafted from the director’s reconstructed memories questioning the meaning of home and identity as a mixed-race, Ethiopian-American growing up amidst cultural dissonance. The viewer is guided through fragments of Empress Taytu (her parents’ Ethiopian restaurant in Cleveland, OH), to the house where she grew up and to the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by a speculative one-way conversation between the narrator and Empress Taytu – the restaurant personified as the historic Ethiopian empress. This story’s narrative arc is driven by the evolution of Robson’s understanding of her identity over time. After being confronted as “ferenj,” meaning foreign in Amharic, can Robson find a way to conquer her racial imposter syndrome and embrace both worlds in one identity?

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR LA-based Cleveland native Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer, and media artist working across film, VR, and installation. Her work has premiered at Tribeca, SXSW, and IDFA, and been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale. She is a Sundance Humanities Fellow and, in 2025, joined the inaugural Sankofa Film Institute workshop led by Haile Gerima. She is currently developing her first documentary feature, Empress Taytu.