Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir was the winner of the The Truer Than Fiction Award for her debut documentary feature Faya Dayi at the 37th annual Independent Spirit Awards, which were handed out yesterday afternoon by Film Independent. The Truer Than Fiction Award is presented to an emerging director of non-fiction features who has not yet received significant attention.
In Faya Dayi, Beshir explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents. Though a deeply personal project—Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar, in eastern Ethiopia, with her family as a teenager due to growing political strife—the film she returned to make about the city, its rural Oromo community of farmers, and the harvesting of the country’s most sought-after export (the euphoria-inducing khat plant) is neither a straightforward work of nostalgia nor an issue-oriented doc about a particular drug culture. Rather, she has constructed something dreamlike: a film that uses light, texture, and sound to illuminate the spiritual lives of people whose experiences often become fodder for ripped-from-the-headlines tales of migration.
Based in Brooklyn, filmmaker, producer and cinematographer Beshir graduated in Film Studies and Literature at UCLA, after which she made several internationally acclaimed short films, including He Who Dances on Wood (2016), which was selected for Hot Docs and won Best International Documentary Short at Edmonton Film Festival and the Jury Award at Anchorage International Film Festival; and Hairat (2017), which premiered at Sundance, and screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and IDFA and won several awards at various other festivals.
