Popular Ethiopian Cinema: Love and Other Genres

Description

This book shines much-needed light on the history, structures and films of the Amharic film industry in Ethiopia. Focusing on the rise of the industry from 2002, until today, and embedded in archival, ethnographic and textual research methods, this book offers a sustained and detailed appreciation of Amharic-language cinema. Michael Thomas considers 'fiker'/love as an organising principle in national Ethiopian culture and, by extension, Amharic cinema. Placing 'fiker' as central to understanding Amharic film genres also illuminates the continuous negotiations at play between romantic, familial, patriotic and spiritual notions of love in these films. Thomas considers the production and exhibition of films in Ethiopia, charting fluctuations and continuities between the past and the present. Having done so, he offers detailed textual readings of films, identifying important junctures in the industry's development and the emergence of new genres. The findings of the book detail the affective characteristics that delineate most Amharic genres and the role culturally specific concepts, such as fiker, play in maintaining the relevance of commercial cinemas reliant on domestic audiences.

Michael W. Thomas is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ethiopian Screen Worlds on the European Research Council funded project, African Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film Studies. Based at SOAS, University of London, UK. He is the co-editor of Cine-Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa (2018) and, as well as having pioneering scholarship on Amharic cinema published in various academic journals and collected volumes, he also produces practice-based research through video-essays and documentaries.

This book provides an engaged and located history of Amharic language Ethiopian cinema. Thomas pays attention to the materiality and socio-political contexts of cinema-going cultures and complicates our understanding of the ways in which audiences engage with and debate genre. -- Carli Coetzee, University of Oxford, UK There are no words to express how much I enjoyed reading Popular Ethiopian Cinema! It is one of the greatest books, not only about the Ethiopian film industry but of pan-African cinema as a whole. Michael W. Thomas provides invaluable insight into Ethiopian filmmakers and their struggle, ideology, aesthetics and social values. -- Endalegeta Kebede, former Cultural Officer for the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, Ethiopia.