Premiere Status – African Premiere
Synopsis – What does it mean for home to be constructed immaterially, via fragments of culture and oral history distorted by the filter of time and migration? Ferenj is a visual dialogue between memory, reality, and the digital, in an afrosurreal dreamscape generated using crowd-sourced data and built using gaming technology. This immersive graphic memoir is 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 Ethiopian restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio, to the director’s childhood home, to the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia via a speculative one-way conversation between the narrator and Empress Taytu–the restaurant personified as the historic empress. Ferenj is an experimental form of decolonial thought that reclaims Ethiopian-American identity, redefines boundaries between memory and the digital imaginary, and challenges reductive narratives of Africa.
Director – Ainslee Alem Robson
Producer – Liam Young, Ainslee Alem Robson
Country – Ethiopia, USA
Language – Amharic, English
Date – 2020
Duration – 10 minutes
Genre – Afrosurrealism
Seated
