Ethiopian-Israeli director Aalam-Warqe Davidian's first feature film, “Fig Tree,” follows a Jewish teenager in Addis Ababa in 1989, during Ethiopia's civil war, The Times of Israel reported in August 2019.
Ethiopian Israelis mark the Sigd holiday in Jerusalem, in a PikiWiki Israel photo dated November 23, 2022. (Lizi Shanan / PikiWiki Israel via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5) [file photo]
The film won the Israeli Academy Award for best cinematography and was screened at the Portland and San Francisco Jewish film festivals in 2019. It was shot in Ethiopia.
Its heroine, Mina, lives in a poor Addis Ababa neighborhood with her brother Retta and grandmother Shwaat while her mother works in Israel to bring the family over. Mina's Christian boyfriend, Eli, is not part of the plan, and young men like him risk being rounded up for Mengistu Haile Mariam's army.
Davidian was born in the village of Awash, raised in Addis Ababa and moved to Israel with her family at age 10. “I was very terrified. I said, ‘No, I do not want to go anywhere, I want to stay here in Ethiopia,’” she told the paper. She later studied at the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem.
She spent six months in Ethiopia making the film with Ethiopian and Israeli crew members. The cast includes Betalehem Asmamawe as Mina and veteran actress Weyenshiet Belachew as Shwaat. “When I got to Ethiopia, I became an Israeli,” Davidian said, adding that in Israel she is considered Ethiopian.
“I have felt a lot of times that the talk about immigration is about getting to a new country, a new destination, and there is not enough discussion about what people left behind,” she said.
Gabeyehu Adugna, an Africana librarian at Boston University who grew up in Addis Ababa, told the paper that fear of conscription led him to leave Ethiopia in 1988. “They did raids in the neighborhood, took a lot of youth,” he said.
Davidian spoke after the fatal police shooting of 19-year-old Solomon Tekah on June 30, 2019, set off protests by Ethiopian Israelis. More than 170,000 Beta Israel live in Israel, many of them brought in Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991, The Times of Israel said.
Sources: The Times of Israel (Rich Tenorio)