Morning Dew

After spending several years studying medicine in Germany, Anberber (Aaron Arefe) returns to his native Ethiopia. He arrives with high ambitions, but they are quickly dashed when Anberber realizes that the idyll of his childhood has given way to fear and violence. Amidst the hopelessness that overwhelms him, Anberber takes refuge again and again in memories of his childhood, his youth, his studies, and before his eyes unfolds the story of a country that is deeply stricken, yet for which there also seems to be hope.

With Morning Dew, director Haile Gerima has staged an engaging journey through more than two decades of Ethiopian history. With his first feature film in eleven years Gerima has directed a highly ambitious work that challenges its viewers in many ways. Not only that the use of different time levels and a constant jumping back and forth between these individual levels makes it almost impossible to sit back and relax or purely enjoy the film's strong visual language. Moreover, since often little is spoken and much is only hinted at, a certain background knowledge of politics and contemporary history is advantageous in order to truly understand the events presented in the original with German subtitles.

But even though this is enormously exhausting with a running time of 140 minutes, the viewer is also rewarded for it. For Morning Dew, despite some lengths and weaknesses, is an engaging drama whose numerous strong moments dominate over the lengths and somewhat unwieldier aspects of the production. What's striking here is that it's the scenes set in Germany that are among the film's biggest weaknesses. While the moments in Anberber's homeland manage to convince despite numerous very obvious amateur actors, Anberber's memories of Germany come across as somewhat stilted and strainedly instructive.

Whoever is interested in African cinema and the history of Ethiopia and is willing to invest any amount of attention and seat time will experience Morgentau as a real program cinema gem despite its weaknesses. However, those who have a hard time with beautifully photographed but somewhat unwieldy arthouse films anyway will be put to one hell of a test here. Worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp