Hairat
2017 · 7m · Ethiopia
Directed by Jessica Beshir
Genres: biography, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
A dreamlike black-and-white portrait of Yussuf Mume Saleh, a farmer in Harar who revived the nightly tradition of hand-feeding wild hyenas — the first film by the director of Faya Dayi.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A seven-minute black-and-white essay about hand-feeding hyenas sounds like the kind of precious art-doc everyone pretends to get—and somehow Beshir makes it work by refusing to sentimentalize the premise, instead letting the absurdity of the tradition speak for itself without comment.
Beshir's formal control here is immaculate: the dreamlike pacing, the tonal restraint, the way she positions this intimate portrait within a lineage of poetic documentary that honors both ethnographic specificity and pure image-making—it's the work of a filmmaker fully conscious of where she sits in the essay-film tradition.
The decision to shoot in black-and-white is the whole film—it dissolves the gap between document and reverie, letting the nocturnal feeding ritual become something neither purely observational nor purely imagined, which on a seven-minute budget and with first-time feature filmmaking ahead, is a hell of a gamble that pays.
Reviews
Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir describes her short Hairat as "my first everything." Although its dreamlike black-and-white cinematography foreshadows her 2021 breakout documentary Faya Dayi, Hairat stands alone as an entrancing character study in miniature. Hairat is a portrait of Yussuf