Jessica Beshir, whose film Faya Dayi won awards at obscure film festivals, but which failed to nail an Oscar, is now sitting in a jury, returning to the festival which gave her $20,000 for Faya Dayi.
...her film is about an alien, non-Catholic, spirituality...
And not only an alien, non-Catholic, spirituality, but an evocative one, of one "going to the other side,"... This is nothing about God, and the spirituality from God, but an evocation, a summoning, of other spirits. Beshir herself has admitted in interviews that the "songs" in Faya Dayi, the chants, were a type of evocation of spirits.
And Beshir combines this alien spirituality, this evocations of spirits "from the other side," with a
radical political message of liberation, and even secession, for "social justice" of "oppressed" minority groups in Ethiopia, specifically the Oromo people of southern Ethiopia from where her immigrant-to-Mexico medical doctor father Hussein Beshir hails.
Well, Beshir has found her match.
Buchi's biography reads:
Born in 1981 in Neuchatel, Switzerland. Tizian Büchi graduated in History and Aesthetics of Cinema from the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and in directing from Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) in Belgium. He worked as programmer for various Swiss festivals and in film distribution.
Congratulations! LIKE AN ISLAND written and directed by Tizian Buchi is the first Swiss film to win the Grand Prix of Visions du Réel du Réel since 2013. The feature-length debut, set in Lausanne, convinced the jury as a "brilliant observation that translates the coordinates of geographical spaces into universal dimensions".
There is nothing more on Tizian in google searches, but his twitter profile shows
this:
Buchi's is described as coming from Lausanne, Switzerland. His last name Buchi appears, in google searches, be a European name (Swiss/Germanic/French), and his first name Tizian, a variation on the name Italian name Titian, and
also the name of the renowned Italian painter Titian (
Tiziano Vecellio).
But Tizian Buchi's features belie a Middle-Eastern/Arab connection, indicating the long, sustained, "immigration" from North African and surrounding areas - Turkey, and the Middle East. Or perhaps he is Jewish.
Here is a
synopsis of his film, presented at the
Visions du Réel film festival, in Nyon, Switzerland:
A small urban island becomes the metaphor of contemporary Europe and lends itself to a deep reflection about the absurdity of borders, rules, fences and barriers. A brilliant observation, a surprising wondering, that rewrites the coordinates of geographical spaces in universal terms,” said the jury, composed of filmmaker Jessica Beshir [KPA: my emphasis], the winner of last year’s Grand Prix, Beatrice Fiorentino, general delegate of the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week, and Jovan Marjanović, director of the Sarajevo Film Festival.
So, there it is, the Beshir connection.
Beshir's themes of migration/immigration, ethnicity, alienation, and ultimately a spirit-infused, alternate reality is exactly what Buchi films.
"Tizian Buchi Blends Reality and Magic in His Portrait of a Neighborhood 'Like and Island'" is the
title at the film review online magazine,
Variety.
Says Buchi: “I love to distill little touches of fiction into a film, to create a dialogue between what is real and what is not. I like it when things are mixed up and we don’t know exactly what is what.”
But why, why disorient the audience? Why disorient us?
As I wrote in one of my posts on Beshir, where I posted my letter to Ryerson University's media faculty (Ryerson is where obtained my photography and film training): One of my most visceral reactions to "Experimental Film," which I studied in Ryerson, is that I felt a sense of "bewitchment" of being transported away from myself, of being under a spell.
I think Beshir uses these experimental film techniques to arrive at her "bewitchment" of the audience, in order to pull them into her film, to transport them to this "merkhanna" or the high induced by khat, which becomes a spiritual high, and for the audience to enter this realm of her film - a cinematic high.
I have written an article, in defiance of Beshir's "merkhanna" spell, a defiance which I gained after watching scores of beautiful, bewitching, flickering images of the experimental films. I wouldn't have been able to write this article without my film education in Ryerson.
But Beshir has a bigger agenda of splitting Ethiopia apart, inducing young Oromo men to war, and supporting a very concrete secessionist movement in Ethiopia. People are malleable, and easily manipulated through the merkhanna of film. The majority of viewers are from Western countries, and her film was screened mostly in Europe and North America, where the understandable lack of knowledge of the viewers makes them susceptible to Beshir's manipulations, where they can influence international, and foreign, affairs related to Ethiopia. Ethiopians are slowly denouncing this film, its "drug" focus, and its political agendas. The majority of Ethiopians, the Oromo included, do not support any form of secession.
But beyond the bewitchment of the audience, Beshir, and Buchi manipulate the under-the-radar, murmuring spirits of their environments, rich in non-Christian, non-traditional (a plethora of immigrants in Buchi's case, and the Muslim/pagan Oromo separated by design both by the Oromo themselves and the rulers of various Ethiopian imperial and governmental regimes in Beshir's film).
And both latch on to these "alienated" peoples, these "migrants" these "displaced" peoples in various forms, including the white/dominant culture and population which is numbed into acquiescence. And with this, they try to drag us down to back earth. Spirits guide the films, but social justice and oppression are simply the earthly concerns. Both Beshir and Buchi stand on shaky ground with their spiritual evocations. Still, "social justice" and "oppression" are more palatable than flying witches, and hence the camouflage they use to submerge their films with floating spirits.
Ultimately, Buchi's and Beshir's films are about a parallel universe of hazy spirits, brought on by khat, in Beshir's film (the chewable mild-narcotic/hallucinogenic leaf from the southern Ethiopia region of Oromo), and the isolated lives of Buchi's protagonists, in their mountainous, forest town, where nature itself becomes their narcotic, seeping creatures into their godless realm through the whispering forest branches.
Next project - I predict: Buchi and Beshir will team up. This time, in Europe/America/The Evil West, to "discover" a whole new realm of wondering spirits, in the social justice bereft, oppression filled world of post-immigrant America/Canada/Europe.
