SYNOPSIS: FAYA DAYI, Ethiopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir’s hypnotic documentary feature, explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents. Though a deeply personal project—Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar with her family as a teenager due to growing political strife—the film she returned to make about the city, its rural Oromo community of farmers, and the harvesting of the country’s most sought-after export (the euphoria-inducing khat plant) is neither a straightforward work of nostalgia nor an issue-oriented doc about a particular drug culture. Rather, she has constructed something dreamlike: a film that uses light, texture, and sound to illuminate the spiritual lives of people whose experiences often become fodder for ripped-from-the-headlines tales of migration. A Janus Films release.
OPENS SEPTEMBER 3 IN NEW YORK AT FILM AT THE LINCOLN CENTER AND SEPTEMBER 17 IN LOS ANGELES AT THE LAEMMLE ROYAL
As if under the intoxicating influence of the drug itself, Faya Dayi unfurls as a hallucinogenic cinematic reverie, capturing hushed, intimate moments in the existences 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.
About Jessica Beshir: Jessica Beshir is a Mexican-Ethiopian director, producer and cinematographer based in Brooklyn, New York. She made her directorial debut with her short film Hairat, which premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and was released by the Criterion Channel. Her short films, He Who Dances on Wood (PBS) and Heroin (Topic), have screened in festivals and museums around the world including Hot Docs, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, IDFA, the Tribeca Film Festival, the Eye Film Museum, and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, among others. Faya Dayi is Jessica’s feature debut.
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