1141 Faya dayi

[swo17]

Faya dayi



A sublime work of personal vision, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic documentary immersion in the world of Ethiopia's Oromo and Harari communities, places where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once prized for its supposedly mystical properties—holds sway over the rituals and rhythms of everyday life. As if under the influence of the drug itself, Faya dayi unfurls as intoxicating, trance state cinema, capturing intimate moments in the existence of everyone from the harvesters of the crop to people lost in its narcotic haze to a desperate but determined younger generation searching for an escape from the region's political strife. The director's exquisite monochrome cinematography—each frame a masterpiece sculpted from light and shadow—and the film's time-bending, elliptical editing create a ravishing sensory experience that hovers between consciousness and dreaming.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital master, approved by director Jessica Beshir, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Three short films by Beshir: He Who Dances on Wood (2016); Heroin (2017); and Hairat (2017), featuring an introduction by Beshir
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price

[CSM126]

Faya beavi

[Red Screamer]

No comments on the film yet? I saw it on the festival circuit and thought it was intriguing but kind of shapeless and more sleepy than hypnotic. The claims made for its well-done b&w cinematography here as elsewhere are a bit much, as you can probably tell just from the screenshots. Beshir seems to have both talent and gusto but one viewing left me unsure as to why the film was received as a fully realized work rather than a debut with promise. But maybe that would change with a revisit.

[John Cope]

One of my favorite films from last year. A superbly immersive meditative experience as well as a finely observed ethnographic study of a region in which the unique drug crop has become the supreme cash crop and cultural unifier, all rendered in a sumptuously shimmering black and white that rivals Julian Hernandez. A film like this or some similarly focused films by Kiarostami or Costa or Ceyaln or even the Manchevski picture Before the Rain casts back upon us the realization and recognition of a much more bare and essential form of life that makes do with far less than we are used to that's for sure. But in the best of these films, and this is surely one of those, it also presents itself as fundamental or essential to our being, a form that all else could easily collapse back into but one that is far from deprived from its constitution as art, as great art.

[Matt]

This is showing on most PBS stations tonight

[brundlefly]

Found this very impressive once I went into it with sober focus. As Red Screamer and Chris suggest, it’s neither straightforward nor excited, and even while it uses the narcotic haze of its subject matter as an appropriate excuse to roam between consciousnesses (and perhaps abuses it as an excuse to make every image glow), I stupidly first tried to vibe with the film while surfacing from an anesthetic and kept nodding off.

Beshir knows her film is going to float, so she anchors it several ways. There’s an obvious symmetry in its beginning and end and a thematic throughline about the draw of life elsewhere and the pull of home. There’s the procedural journey of the khat, worked here from a single field’s functional origin story (we grew coffee until the rains stopped) to industrial expanse. And there’s a mythical origin story, a fable broken into three parts to tease and resonate. Solid framework.

But that wind! She disembodies conversations and monologues constantly, moving in and out of them as confidently as Wenders’ angels, sidling up to a Malicky sensibility, suggesting a portrait of a town by taking sounds of workaday encounters, quietly anxious yearnings, and the ritual and rot of its business and projecting them on to stylized found images. Memories to take with you, should you leave.