LIJEN (ልጄን) | My Child
2022 · 17m · Ethiopia
Directed by Yesmalem T. Yeshaw
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An Ethiopian man grieving his daughter's death is helped by his American wife, who turns to his roots so he can face reality.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The setup reads like grief-processing 101 until you realize the film is actually interrogating how cultural memory becomes a site of survival — the American wife doesn't rescue him with love, she rescues him by *becoming* the witness to his tradition, which is weirder and more honest than the premise wants you to think.
Yeshaw positions this within the lineage of intimate family portraiture — think Kiarostami's domestic spaces — but the formal choice to let Amharic and English coexist without hierarchy, untranslated, becomes the film's thesis about grief living between two worlds; it's the kind of subtle formal decision that reprogram how you understand every scene in hindsight.
The entire emotional architecture hinges on a single choice: the wife's decision to *not* speak, to simply sit in the ceremonial space, and that restraint — that one act of listening instead of solving — does the work of a twenty-minute script in seventeen minutes.