Crumbs dir. by Miguel Llansó (review)

In Crumbs, Miguel Llansó’s feature film debut, the future does not look like New York or Tokyo, or alternatively, like the postapocalyptic arid wasteland of science fiction films. The projection of the future was shot at Ethiopia’s Dallol Volcano, Wenchi Crater Lake, and the old Dire-Dawa train station, as well as in green forests, an abandoned bowling alley, and an old potash mine. Llansó was born in Madrid and is based in Addis Ababa. The line producer for Crumbs, the Ethiopian director Yohannes Feleke, previously co-directed the short 2010 film Where’s My Dog?with Llansó. The protagonist of Crumbsis played by the Ethiopian theater and film actor Daniel Tadesse, who worked with Llansó and Feleke on the short film Chigger Ale(2013).

The narrative takes place on Earth many years after “the Big War” has diminished the population. When a bowling machine starts to function on its own, the protagonists—who refer to each other as Candy and Birdy (Tadesse and Selam Tesfaye)—imagine that that this is a signal from their long-inoperative spaceship, which hovers above the landscape. Candy believes that he, like his hero Superman, is extraterrestrial. Former Earthly civilizations are both alien and dear to Candy and Birdy, who cling to the extinguished population’s leftover goods. Ninja turtle figurines, plastic swords manufactured by Carrefour (“the last total artist”), and artificial Christmas firs are valued as amulets and so revered that the characters assume they had supernatural powers before the war-induced apocalypse. These items and others are up for trade or sale in a shop whose proprietor (Mengistu Berhanu) acts comically as the film’s historian-anthropologist, dating and interpreting the significance of these holy relics. He tells us that the toy Max Steel sword, “made by Mattelo,” was highly regarded in its heyday and used by Molegon warriors, its design dating to the pre-apocalypse era. He recounts that Michael Jackson’s vinyl album Dangerousis from the third century and inspired Molegon warriors to launch into battle. The shop owner’s narratives parody the manner of experts who piece histories out of the “crumbs” of ancient civilizations, African and otherwise; in the backdrop there are statues of elephants, lions, and camels.

In an April 2015 interview with Oliver Hunt in Gorilla Online(http://gorillafilmonline.com/), Llansó provides some insight into these fictional Molegon warriors: “American society, with Hollywood at the forefront, builds archetypes and characters from overcoming adversity because it’s a dialectical, warrior society.” In its satirical interpretation of the present world’s absurd, grandiose, and violent preoccupations, the film also gathers up the “crumbs” of American cinema: The Godfather, forty years of Superman, and the odd, decontextualized figure of a thief in a Nazi outfit. In the director’s statement on the website of Festival Scope (www.festivalscope.com), Llansó recounts that his inspiration for the film came from a comment of Seifu Yohannes, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Harar:

All your dreams of wealth and unlimited power, all your dreams of disproportionate ambition; the satisfaction of feeling analogous to the gods, all your sexual impulses which you deem infinite; all these pharaonic dreams will be reduced to a series of cheap plastic figurines floating in the stratosphere once everything has finally exploded.

In the hope that he will be taken home on the spaceship, Candy embarks on a journey to find Santa Claus (wonderfully acted by Tsegaye Abegaz), who is now living in a dark hole. Taking relics of the old warrior society with him, Candy first seeks the guidance of a clairvoyant witch (Shitay Abreha). Finally, a bureaucratic Santa promises to grant any wish of Candy and Birdy as long as they do not deviate from the prescribed wish list. The fight with Santa is quite funny, and functions as a critique of globally manufactured desire.

Science fiction films imagine the future, but their targets are usually contemporary problems that play themselves out in reversals...