A lyric essay in film form, directed by Jessica Beshir, exploring the use, rituals and grim realities of and around khat culture in Ethiopia. It is a remarkably beautiful, hazy film, shot entirely in monochrome, moving around its world in slow stoned tread. The film’s intoxicated lens makes for an impressionistic swirl of lives and experiences, rather than a documentary’s focus and hard edges, and is all the better for that.
There are moments that made me just sit still and be in the lives of the people recorded here: the man explaining in slow drugged cadence that the taste of coffee has changed since they started growing more khat, for some reason, transfixed me.
I watched FAYA DAYI on MUBI, a subscription service you can check out at this link here, and Criterion put it out on blu-ray.