Beshir is participating in the Festival Internacional de Cine UNAM, both presenting her film Faya Dayi, and also as part of a panel: Cine de la liberación - dislocaciones binarias y diáspora negra.
Here is the Facebook page where the video is posted. The event took place on March 16.
Beshir is participating in this with another couple, whose theme is essentially "futurism," or how blacks and Africans need to prepare for a future "post-colonial" space. This concept is not new, and it is essentially about removing the black race from the present, colonial, racist, space - their argument, not mine.
It is telling that Beshir agreed to participate in such a panel, and that such a panel chose her.
Note: I have written the comments mostly by Beshir, with the timeline points. Most of these comments are my transcription/translation from the Spanish to English, and although the session was in English, the translator's loud voice hides the English.
I think the "raw" interview is fascinating, and is essentially a reiteration of Beshir's concepts and ideology, which I have written about (retrievable through the search box on my website).
I found this presentation especially intriguing because I know that space, where I attended many cultural events while living in Mexico.
It was also in Mexico where I started my formal/informal training in filmmaking, with Sergio Garica, which became part of my art education in painting, dance, drama, and film, and all of which was instrumental in the directions I took in studying and practicing art after I left Mexico.
Mexico is where I became an artist.
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Beshir starts to participate around the 25 -28 minute points, and makes all her replies in English, in a rapid and frenetic manner, more so than she has appeared in other interviews.
She is not saying anything new, and in fact doubles down on her "oppressed" Oromo people rhetoric, and attributes some hidden, nefarious agenda by "the powers that be" which aim to destroy these people.
Perhaps one thing that I will focus on, which I may not have discussed fully earlier, is that Beshir insists on this 80+ ethnic groups that make part of Ethiopia. This is part of her agenda to say that Ethiopia is a splintered country, with no cohesiveness. But of course, this is false.
There is a common national culture, with Amharic as its language base, through which all official, educational, business and other public interactions take place. That is not to say that groups of people don't speak their own languages, which they do, and follow their cultures, which they do in their familiar surroundings, like the Oromo in the south, the Tigray in the north, etc.
But for the most part, the Ethiopian population continues to accept Amharic, and the Amhara cultural base. For example, there is doro wot, whose literal translation is chicken sauce, which is an Amhara Christian creation where the chicken is cut into twelve parts, signifying the twelve tribes of Israel, and the twelve apostles. All ethnic groups call this dish in the Amharic language - doro wot [KPA update: All ethnic groups SERVE this Amhara dish, with its Amhara-based ingredients, even as they call it in their own languages. Still, as many Oromo speak Amharic, they will understand, and even call, this dish as "doro wot." Source].
Of course, Beshir's splintering of Ethiopia into disparate, non-cohesive groups, leads to her underlying message of split/multiple "spiritualities," around a pre-Christian/pre-Muslim legend which she made Faya Dayi, and therefore her argument for khat as part of an important object in the spiritual life of these southern Oromo people.
I have also refuted that, saying that khat has become an addictive drug, destroying the Oromo communities, and giving them nothing in return, and even those older members of the community who may chew the leaf as part of a spiritual ritual end up addicted to its euphoria. Most Oromo, responsible Oromo who care for their families and communities, are ambivalent at best about khat.
In any case, as with all things subversive and hidden, truth and information need to be dug up and brought to the surface, and my articles explain all this to show Beshir's agendas, and ultimately her anti-Ethiopanism, including her anti-Oromo decisions while making a film that promotes khat, as she gives the liberty of "choice" to these Oromo youth to live drug-addicted lives. I say in one of my articles that Beshir should relocate to Harar, from her smart Brooklyn apartment, and use her prize money to actually help these desolate youth, rather than film them and talk about them.
Beshir is ultimately an Oromo secessionist - hence the title of the panel: Cine de la liberación - Liberation Cinema.
These astute Mexican film programmers understood her film was beyond khat, but is actually a subversive political film. But they agree with her, since their world view, enclosed in "oppression" and "social justice" is the same as hers.
Beshir resumes around the 36 minute point (up to the 41 minute point), and talks about funds (lack of), when she initially started her project. But, with close to several bouts of $25,000 prize money after the film got screened, I say that she has been very well compensated!
She then takes on the audacious role of a spokeswoman for the underfunded, ignored (her opinion, not mine), documentary makers of Africa! She endows herself a bigger mission now, to show how uninterested, and thus how "racist," the world is about Africa's problems.
Around the 37 minute point, Beshir begins to yell (at the screen, of course, since she is participating via zoom), indignant about the lack of support for her film, the neglected African woman that she is.
I wonder if she has been partaking of khat - the leaf that induces euphoria?!
Then she brings in comes in the "community" around the 51 minute point, which assisted her even as she had no funds to pay them with - those poor, destitute Oromo communities for whom she didn't even have short change.
Beshir rambles for some minutes about "language" (up to the 57 minute point), and she has previously admitted she doesn't speak the various Oromo languages and dialects and used various sources (she outsourced) to translate the film's Oromo dialogues.
She then talks esoterically about "cinematographic language" and that it reflects the region, the place. She admitted in an earlier interview that since she didn't understand the dialogues, the Oromo language the region's people speak, when she went to film her project in the Oromo region, she used visual cues and elements to help her with her film and to create some kind of filmic "language" (without its actual meaning, because she didn't understand it herself). The dialogues then became part of an undefined audio, of sounds, to complement and to describe, the images. Sound simply became an element separate from its actual meaning. She insists that her lack of particular understanding of the language (the truth of what the Oromo were actually saying, and telling her) assisted her in uncovering a generalized Truth about the Oromo condition, about their social, political, economical and spiritual matters, and from which she deciphered inner messages. And she mentions, in passing, rapidly, as though wishing to hide this fact, that she didn't speak any of this plethora of languages, but grew up speaking Amharic.
All this I have discussed and refuted in my various articles and postings on Beshir - the easiest way to get to them is to search for Beshir, or Faya Dayi, in the search box at the top of my website.
An audience member asks a related question around the 1 hour 31 minutes point: how does one make a film about a place where one does not live?
Beshir gives her standard answer: that's the reason it took her ten years of back-and-forth to complete the film. And how she got to know the place as close as possible without living there.
And Beshir resorts to her "roots" in the area as another reason why it was easier for her to adjust herself with the place, to reconcile herself to it.
I will interject here: Beshir never gives us a calendar which describes her time in the various regions in the world - Harar (Ethiopia), Mexico, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn. She is very evasive about the number of years she lived in these places, and when. Of course she repeatedly tells us about her ten-year back-and-forth, but never any clear dates of when were these ten years. From my calculations, she has lived in Mexico only two years, when she returned with her family after her childhood and early teenage years in Harar. So her early childhood (it appears that she was born in Mexico, soon after which her father with her Mexican mother returned to Harar after receiving his medical degree) through to her sixteen years were spent in Harar. And soon - two years - after her family relocated to Mexico, she relocated to Los Angeles to go to university. So, she appears to have lived in Mexico only for two years.
And despite the esteem Mexicans in the festival give her, their astute film programmers placed her in a "diaspora negra" slot and not in any part of the Mexican "national" question. I doubt Beshir considers herself "black," although she uses this slot to further her agendas. She "came home" to Mexico to show her "Ethiopian" film, but was presented as a foreigner, an African "diaspora."
And in the intuitiveness, and intelligence, of the Mexican programmers, not only is she a "diaspora," but her film is about an alien, non-Catholic, spirituality that her panel members share with her.
And not only an alien, non-Catholic, spirituality, but an evocative one, of one "going to the other side," as one of her co-panelists says. This is nothing about God, and the spirituality from God, but an evocation, a summoning, of other spirits. Beshri herself has admitted in interviews that the "songs" in Faya Dayi, the chants, were a type of evocation of spirits.
Around the 1 hour 32 minutes point, Beshir starts to answer an audience member's question about making a film about a place where a filmmaker such as she doesn't live, about a film in a foreign land.
She rationalizes this geographical "distance," her physical distance from Harar by saying that it helped the film. Because, with her persistent back-and-forth, it became a labor of love, of commitment! She states that Harar was always on her mind, so she never had a psychological distance from it. The film thus became my path, says Beshir. Her Mission.
And Beshir continues with her subversive language, which she has to use to answer the question asked by the audience member. That her mission is political, surrounding Oromo protests, which are kept alive by a secessionist-minded, small minority of the Oromo, whose leaders direct and influence the movements and armed insurgents from various American and Canadian centers. Again, I have written about this in my articles and posts, and this information can be found through the search box at the top of my website. The Oromo movements would not have been successful without this "international" influence, and it begs the question how much Beshir is involved in this from her Brooklyn post.
These ten years, in fact, gave her a political education that she couldn't have had in a few short months' stay in the Oromo region, had she acquired immediately the necessary funds for her travel and her project. This is for "The lucha de la gente Oromo" - "The struggle of the Oromo people" - says Beshir near the end of the video, about her film.
And this leads to the final question from an audience member (around 1:39 -1:47 point) who asks about identity, and how film can help in the construction of culture, and identity, surrounded as we are by a patriarchal, white, western, Christian force.
Beshir answers around the 1 hour 44 point, that the question has to do with the identities, and she resumes her theme of the 80+ ethnic groups, and continues that she has never seen her particular ethnic group on film, and they (these 80 + groups including her particular ethnic group) become invisible, in relation to the Amhara. There is much to contest about this, including numerous anthropological films about, and of, the Oromo, and not to mention the fact that there isn't that big a source of films about any of the Ethiopian groups.
This statement is another political, ideological, statement, to stress her point that these groups have been rendered invisible even in their portrayal in media - artistic or otherwise.
Beshir continues talking loudly, gesticulating frenetically. She begins talking about her deracination, when she was pulled out of this region during the political instabilities following the fall of the Emperor Haile Selassie, and especially during the Communist government from the late 1970s in Ethiopia to the early nineties. But this occurred to all Ethiopians, irrespective of ethnic group. The Communist government was an equal-opportunity deracinator.
She tells the audience that she took ten years to re-connect with, and with film, to show all those other deracinated Oromo people. "Colonialism" becomes the magic word, which Beshir whispers somewhere in her argument, even though technically, and historically, the Oromo were not "colonized" in the manner the rest of the African regions were colonized. The Oromo's history, which I have also discussed in my articles (located through the search box), was a complex symbiosis of Amhara/Christian based rulers who gave maximum autonomy to the peripheral regions such as the Oromo's, as they, the Amhara rulers, became their protectors. The Oromo were always considered Ethiopian by these governors and Emperors.
Beshir, and the interview, finishes off around the 1 hour 51 point about documentary, documentation, and archives of information, and on how to negate the Western Gaze. She confesses that she wanted to go somewhere which was completely different from this "Western Gaze," rebuking all those White, western colonialists, filmmakers and other chroniclers, who used blacks, and Africans, to make their racist films.
The irony, of course, is that Beshir is trained in exactly this "Western Gaze," and became an apt and ready student. She used her camera to "gaze" at these Oromo people, to present her ideological and political film. She came out hundreds of thousands of dollars richer, and had cinema theaters in Europe and North America filled with intrigued audiences sit in comfortable film theaters, "gazing" at her film on state-of-the-art wide screens showing the plight, and stupor, of these poor, desolate youth, far away from them, in Africa.
But, beyond "oppression," the "Western Gaze," and even her family relations and connections to the Oromo region, there is a more subtle, and I think a more dangerous, film that Beshir made.
At the very end, around the 1 hour 52 point, Beshir says: "How does one document the spiritual, spirituality? How does one document all these invisible things? These, for me, were super-important."
Beshir never, as is her strategy, directly talks about this "spiritual," and this walk into the the other side.
But an audience member articulates this for her at the very end (around the 1 hour 54 point), and asks his question around the spirituality, and spirits:
"Many times, the themes of territorial exploitation work around materialism, around physicality, but what about animism, the life of the object, of the spirits that inhabit spaces...and listening to Jessica, I see these visions of magic and mysticism."
Beshir replies (around the 1 hour 59 point): "I took into account all the portals of entry for instinct and intuition, all these entries and exits... I had my Sufi priest as a guide, and one of the things that he told me was that the walled city of Harar is like a labyrinth, which was a reflection of life, where unlike a highway, one cannot see where one will go, there is no clear, direct route. That life itself is a maze, a labyrinth."
The Sufi, although part of the Muslim world are connected more with the mysticism. From here:
Sufism is a mystic body of religious practice within Islam characterized by a focus on Islamic spirituality, ritualism, asceticism and esotericism
And from here:
Sufism, or Tasawwuf as it is known in the Muslim world, is Islamic mysticism
Beshir continues that this labyrinth became for her a way of examining interiority, the mind's interior, for her to navigate through its indirectness. (It lack of clear cut exit?).
This interiority, her instinct and intuition, this spirituality then becomes her guide.
And Beshir gets perturbed here, reacting to this endless, exit-less labyrinth, perhaps portraying her state of mind, her own inner labyrinth, which left her the labyrinth of this Oromo region with its magical realism and the spirits that still haunt her.