Faya Dayi (Jessica Beshir, 2021) (Patreon)

This is a uniquely frustrating documentary, because it has so much potential. First-time director Beshir uses an intellectually impressive approach to the problem of depicting contemporary life in eastern Ethiopia, choosing to focus not on the plight of a single subject or family. She does focus on a specific community -- the Oromo farmers of Harar and the network of individuals surrounding them. But essentially, Faya Dayi forgoes a strictly human focus in order to adopt a more materialist stance. This film is fundamentally about khat: those who grow it, harvest it, cut and sell it, use it in Sufi religious rites, and those whose hopelessness has led them down the path of addiction. 

The cash crop, then, is like a tendril, insidiously wending its way into every facet of Ethiopian life. We encounter various people along the way who share their stories -- a student who had to leave school to pick khat to support his family; two young brothers, one of whom is considering leaving the country to find a better life; a young man describing his father's khat addiction and how it has destroyed their relationship; etc. Through it all, Beshir is attentive to the multiple meanings and uses of khat, as both a traditional part of Muslim mysticism and as a capitalist social blight, enriching a few but impoverishing many more.

The major difficulty of Faya Dayi, however, has to do with its abandonment of any traditional form of organization or exposition. It's evident that Beshir's formal style is intended to create a mental network or constellation of associations across time. But if you look closely at the film, there is no clear sense of why one shot follows another, or why certain brief segments are presented in proximity while others are distant from one another in the running time. Beshir has collected lots of qualitatively different material: observational realism, talking head interviews, abstract sequences grounded with poetic voiceover, and a number of sections (like with the two brothers) that are so intimate as to suggest the filmmaker has staged reenactments, getting people to "play themselves" in the manner of Roberto Minervini or the Ross brothers.

In this respect, the black-and-white cinematography begins to seem like a decision that provides a unifying element where, strictly speaking, there is none. When we encounter a group of student activists late in the film, it's disorienting because up to this point, Faya Dayi has said virtually nothing about Ethiopian politics, democratic struggles, or the war with Eritrea. To be fair, Beshir was under no obligation to address everything under the sun, but Faya Dayi's almost random structure seems so permeable as to permit almost anything to be included, so long as it tangentially relates to khat. This is one instance in which a clearer organization -- for example, thematic chapters or section headings -- would have made the film not only more informative, in the conventional sense, but more artistically evocative as well. Related ideas would then provide a coherent editing strategy, and the result would have been a tighter but still reasonably open-form film essay. 

So in short, Faya Dayi doesn't feel finished. But then it's been picked up by Janus Films, which sort of anoints it as an instant classic, so what the hell do I know?