Teza dir. by Haile Gerima (review)

Teza, the latest work of the director Haile Gerima, has been widely lauded in festivals for everything from its musical score to its acting and cinematography, and it has received dozens of awards from, among others, FESPACO, the Venice Film Festival, and the Dubai International Film Festival. The story of the protagonist, Anberber, takes us from Cold War East Germany to the ousting of Emperor Haile Selassie and the subsequent Marxist regime of Haile Mariam Mengistu in the 1970s, ‘80s, and early ‘90s. The scenery moves between rural Gondar, Addis Ababa, and East Germany in addressing the postcolonial disillusionment of Cold War Ethiopia in the aftermath of the 1973 Wollo famine.

The narrative effortlessly weaves together several time periods, moving between memories and the present to capture the redundancy of history’s violence. It begins in the present in Anberber’s natal village, where he is attempting to heal inexplicable night terrors and memory gaps surrounding the loss of his leg. Then the chronology moves backwards as Anberber, through personal reflections, his mother’s help, and local holy men, uncovers the blocked-off horrors of his past years. Once a socialist activist in Germany alongside progressive white Germans and other Ethiopian students with aspirations for a new Ethiopian social order after centuries of imperial rule, Anberber had returned to Addis Ababa in 1974 as a scientist working to cure infectious diseases alongside classmates who studied in Europe. We then see him as a young man speaking out about the brutality of Mengistu’s regime, which has transformed the country into a heavily surveyed police state. His principled position against violence in the capital and in rural Gondar makes him a target in the witchhunt of the Derg’s communist tribunals as well as a marginal figure to his peers, who refuse to risk their jobs and their lives to protest the atrocities around them.

The style of Teza, which is dramatically different from that of Gerima’s earlier works, reflects the frustrations of the main character, which are never fully assuaged by the empty promises he receives. He is neither fully convinced of the effectiveness of revolutionary action, nor willing to compromise his principles of nonviolence. Unlike Gerima’s canonical work Sankofa (1993), which foregrounds a return-to-origins narrative that valorizes the traditional African past and is typical of the cinema of decolonization, Teza seems to delve into a postcolonial disillusionment over the failings of the revolutionary spirit following African independence. The beauty of this film emerges in the demonstration of how these larger political struggles are represented through the everyday lives of the characters. Anberber’s struggles mirror those of many Ethiopians of his generation: young men and women who studied abroad and returned with sincere aims to improve their country, only to be met with interrogations, tribunals, and state violence on the part of working-class agents of the new communist regime whose main interests were the appropriation of bourgeoisie comforts for themselves.

The plot showcases the warring political ideologies among rural inhabitants of Ethiopia and the consequences of the power struggles. Anberber, once a young organizer in Germany vying for communist rule in his country, now finds himself defending the young men of his mother’s village who are being kidnapped, recruited, and killed by the Derg army. Alongside the army seizures is the zemetcha, an obligatory governmental organization requiring revolutionary student youths to proselytize for the regime in rural areas. Gerima presents montage sequences showing close-ups of the faces of zemetcha soldiers robotically repeating the names of the model socialist countries—“Albania, China, Russia”—while the destruction caused by the regime continues around them. Anberber clashes with these militant youth, so convinced of the immediacy and effectiveness of their cause, and is reminded of the political fervor he once harbored as a young man among his hopeful, progressive comrades in 1970s Germany. The confrontation exposes his internal struggle: his desperation to...