Enkokilish puzzles me

This week I saw an Ethiopian film which I judged worthy of its audience. Not only did Enkokilish match up to my expectation of what an Ethiopian film should be but it also surpassed it.

Although not for the first time, I am compelled to praise the Ethiopian brain that flowed with creative juices and produced the script for Enkokilish. This is the first film since Yeferd Ken that impressed me.

The first few films made by Ethiopian film makers, defective in picture and sound quality, were excusable for their technical inefficiency. But nobody would forgive them for their run-off-the-mill story line and intelligence-insulting moral. And, many a journalist had subjected them to withering criticism so much so that an association of film makers perceived the media as enemy number one.

If I may use this opportunity to clear up some misunderstanding concerning media criticism, Ethiopia still has no good school for film makers and therefore its films are wanting when it comes to technical matters. And it would be grossly unfair for any layman or professional to criticize beginners on technical points. However, when it comes to creating a sensible story, Ethiopia has plenty of gifted writers, innumerable unpublished scripts of novels and great playwrights. Therefore, let no film maker expect a favorable review for slipshod plots or hope to get away with weak stories.



Some films (I have no desire to mention titles now as I used to do some years ago) had their actors speak in the unnatural Amharic equivalents of such common English phrases like "Who are you?" "What do you want?" and "I'll sort things out". Still others are found guilty of having their characters burst out with elevated language and a style of expression unsuitable and too refined for their intellectual status.

This is how Enkokilish starts. Out in the desert, Mr. Suspicious Husband receives live reports of his wife's behavior in the city broadcast exclusively to him on the cell-phone by a private detective he has hired to watch his family. Burning with rage he calls her right away only to hear a blatant denial which infuriates him all the more. Now, acting the judge, prosecutor and jury, with a cell phone-wielding spy for a witness, his finds Mrs. Wife guilty as charged. She has betrayed his trust and, therefore, he has to dispense swift justice for the sake of his baby daughter.

I find Enkokilish above reproach in every way. The sound is so clear that one need not strain the ears to make out the dialogue. And one more interesting feature about the dialogue is that no character exceeds their limit in social or financial status and level of intellectual maturity. The beauty of the domestic servant's utterances, for example, is not just about speaking with a pronunciation markedly different from that of city folk. She speaks with a kind of vocabulary that complements her northern country accent and is suffused with idioms such as the radio dramas have not overused. The film does not suffer from characters that speak with so much uniformity of style as to declare themselves robots programmed by an author.

One of the most interesting scenes of the film is played out of sight behind a closed door. The lady of the house and her servant go into a small room carrying a pregnant woman faint with sudden labor and they close the door behind them. The encouraging words of the lady, the painful moans of the woman in labor and the incoherent prayers and hysterical shouts of the servant make the incident more believable and unforgettable than a view of the scene could have made it. Besides, it is very appropriate since we view the incident through the eyes of a little girl who waits outside the door.

Enkokilish has plenty of comic relief in its nerve-snapping suspence.
Beza Hailu, script writer and director of Enkokilish, had been writing long narrative poems since childhood and she used to recite them on Meto Haya, the Sunday afternoon ETV entertainment program in the 1990s. During her teenage years in the United States she was presenting her poems on a talent show which was designed for singers. Her long narrative poems usually carried strong themes and ended with surprising climaxes. And they began to grow into full length play scripts which were performed for an Ethiopian community church in Denver, Colorado.

Very common among the comments she received from Ethiopians in Denver was a suggestion that she try her hand at film making. Except for a course on TV production for an Ethiopian community TV, Beza had never taken serious training in film making but she made Enkokilish, her debut film, with what rudimentary knowledge and techniques she had gleaned by herself. Above all, however, she worked on the script with such single-minded devotion bordering on obsession that characters, with distinct personalities, flowed out of her pen and sprang up from the pages of the script and she says they were no less real to her than the people she met daily.

Beza Hailu is now working on another script for a comedy film.





By Yelibenwork Ayele