Faya dayi: Escape and Return

The trance-inducing registers of Faya dayi rely on the score’s oneiric tones. The original music, by William Basinski, Adrian Aniol, and Kaethe Hostetter, is evocative of an internal prayer. They composed an airy and haunting theme, producing a gentle sonic hypnosis that forms an essential part of the film’s sensory immersion. Faya dayi opens with what initially appears to be a still photograph of a dark, wistful landscape shrouded in mist, accompanied by an ecological soundtrack of croaking and chirping. In a way, the mist never fully lifts, and the entirety of Faya dayi luxuriates in a state of diffuse, ambient mystery. The opening shot is shaken from its stillness when a figure appears, running toward the camera, splashing in shallow water, arms playfully outstretched to mimic a plane. This infusion of whimsy is telling of Beshir’s unforced, compassionate approach to the film’s subjects. While there is no rigid hierarchy among them, she foregrounds the concerns of farmers and young people, creating two antipodal but deeply interconnected orientations for Faya dayi: on the one hand, toward the past and the land—the oldest thing there is—and on the other, toward an uncertain future and the dreams of the young.

These changes are bound up in Faya dayi’s portrayal of intergenerational tensions. The misalignment at its crux is between the youths being drawn to Europe and the members of older generations who wish them to stay in Ethiopia. Mohammed Arif, fourteen years old, and his slightly older friend, Ibrahim Mohammed, are shown lying on a mat, identically positioned with their right arms folded underneath their heads—with Ibrahim speaking about the arduous, costly process of going through Egypt to get to Europe. Part of Mohammed’s curiosity about the journey is motivated by the fact that his mother left when he was little, crossing the sea to never return. On the other hand, Ibrahim speaks from the experience of having left and come back because his own mother needed him. In a later scene, in which the farmers are again picking khat leaves, one of them says plainly: “There is nothing like our own country. Yet every regime has kept us from working our fertile land.”

Pointing to a continually difficult contention between the national government and particular communities, the remark is especially expressive of a cross-generational frustration, evoking a sense of nationalism and also resentment about the money that bleeds out of the country and its communities to secure passages to Europe. The same speaker later adds that staying is “better than becoming food for the fishes [. . .] We shouldn’t have to perish in the deserts and the seas to change our lives.” Even while operating as the antithesis of the sensationalized, spectacularized renderings of migrant crossings in news media, Faya dayi engages with the horrors of compelled migration. The saturation of khat signals both a difficult economic situation and a change in the plant’s usage, moving away from its communal and spiritual origins to become an understandably alluring psychoactive escape from those worsening material conditions. Mohammed shares the damaging effects of his father’s khat-chewing habit on their relationship, saying, in heartbreaking tones, “I’m afraid of becoming like my father.” This documentary is throughout preoccupied with the notion of inheritance, of what is preserved and passed down, for better or worse.

A form of cultural, social, and spiritual inheritance, the practice of oral storytelling is at the heart of Faya dayi. The film is spoken largely in Oromo and Harari, as part of Beshir’s determination to honor a rarely screened ethnic and linguistic specificity. One of the most striking formal elements is the film’s reliance on a collective voice-over, a verbal track whose multiple voices are disembodied, are reattached to images of different people or landscapes, and continue to circulate. This choral approach emphatically counters the traditional Western documentary mode of a singular narrator and gives shape to a collective interiority. Storytelling is also accented through the film’s relationship to fable. Faya dayi’s mythopoetic tones are sustained by a fable threaded through the film, fittingly introduced in a hushed and timid voice-over accompanying an enthralling shot of a stone doorway filled with billowing swirls of smoke. The story is of Azurkherlaini, a pious old emir whose fearful prayers lead to Allah coming to him in a dream and instructing him to find Maoul Hayat, the water of eternal life. A tale of fear, desire, forgetting, and grace, it also indicates the spiritual origin point for khat, granted by Allah to Azurkherlaini so that he may be remembered by his people, as a consolation for failing to find the eternal waters before they dried up. The film envelops its documentation of khat as a cash crop in a holistic frame that allows for a full sense of its significance.

For all its dreaminess, Faya dayi is deeply tied to the materiality of what it documents. Narratively, the film highlights the ways that people bound to agricultural economies are enmeshed with their land, through the rhythms and tempos of labor as well as those of rest, thereby honoring ancestral and living ties to the environment. This is gracefully transmitted through Beshir’s poetic visual language. The director’s black-and-white cinematography is a textural marvel, rendering a heightened sense of surface and touch, with the mesmerizing luster of the khat leaves as the film’s jewels. Faya dayi is a film of tactility: a close-up of a hand rattling some coffee beans around a small pan as they roast; a hand putting food in a pot and preparing bread on a stove; a woman’s hands holding a letter and sliding it underneath the fabric of her clothing; a close-up of one young woman’s palms held by another’s; two young men’s hands next to each other patting and pressing clay into wall; hands lost among khat leaves, rummaging through them, picking them off their stems, throwing them, bundling them. Faya dayi is motivated by a haptic attentiveness, and Beshir’s contemplative camera moves like an observational caress.

There is a metacinematic dimension to this approach to the materiality of the film. Mohammed Arif, shot walking past a line of movie posters, speaks in voice-over: “I heard someone say that when people are high, they start watching films in their mind.” In the following scenes, Mohammed enters an abandoned movie theater. Close-ups of filmstrips, a shot of a warped reel of film, the boy examining a defunct projector and playing with an empty reel by spinning it around—all index the physicality of moving images. The scenes in the abandoned movie theater also provoke a reflection on this film’s place in a cinematic landscape. Beshir has cited the influence of her fellow poet of slow cinema Andrei Tarkovsky, and this kinship is certainly reflected in the shared languor of their camera work. Her film also speaks to what the Soviet filmmaker called “sculpting” time and is a beautiful example of his belief in cinema’s unique capacity for temporal transformation. In terms of more recent counterparts, Faya dayi is also in relation to the Hungarian Béla Tarr’s melancholy worlds and methods for channeling the sublime, and to the work of the Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul, with his affinity for folkloric, feverishly lush films that play with sleep states the way Beshir does with trance states.