Screening Ethiopia: A preliminary study of the history and contemporary developments of film production in Ethiopia

Since the early 2000s, Ethiopia has witnessed the rapid growth of a local digital film industry whose economic model is similar to the one adopted by other industries of this kind emerged in African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. Films are shot in digital format, are independently funded and commercially-driven, use Amharic as main language and target local and diasporic audiences. Unlike other productions of this kind around the continent, however, Ethiopian video films are firstly released in the large cinema theatres that characterize Addis Ababa’s urban landscape, and later circulate via VCDs, in Ethiopia, and in internet, throughout the diaspora. As this essay will argue, this aspect gives to the Ethiopian video film phenomenon a number of important specificities which make the study of Ethiopian film production and distribution particularly interesting. Furthermore, within a context defined by a relatively tight governmental control on media production and circulation, the emergence of this phenomenon is introducing important transformations, and modifying the way locally-produced media are perceived and consumed within the Ethiopian public sphere. While being commercially oriented, in fact, videos do produce a social and moral commentary which portrays, and in some cases criticizes, the way the society has transformed over the past few years.
This article presents the preliminary results of an ongoing research on the raising Ethiopian digital film industry, conducted as part of a post-doctoral research project which analyses and compares the economy of digital filmmaking in a few sub-Saharan African countries. The data presented here have been collected through interviews, archival research and participant observation on film sets and distribution venues during a three months research stay in Addis Ababa between the end of 2013 and the beginning of 2014. The paper is divided into four main sections: the first two trace the history of filmmaking in Ethiopia and the emergence of the video phenomenon within this context, the third focuses on the analysis of the video industry’s economy and describes its main specificities, and the fourth presents an overview of the main narrative and aesthetic trends emerged within the context of the Ethiopian film production until today.