Made in Ethiopia’s International and African Premieres Announced!
🎊 The highly-anticipated film will have its International Premiere at Sheffield DocFest and its African Premiere at Encounters South Africa. 🎊
Sheffield DocFest - International Premiere
Thursday June 13 15:15 - 17:05 - Sheffield, UK - TICKET
Saturday June 15 20:30 - 22:20 - Sheffield, UK - TICKET
Encounters South Africa International Documentary Festival - Africa Premiere
Saturday June 22 13: 00 - 15:00 - Johannesburg, South Africa - TICKET
Saturday June 29 17:30 – 19:30 - Cape Town, South Africa - TICKET
Tickets are on sale for all our Sheffield, Encounters, Tribeca and DC/DOX screenings. Snap one up quick below👇, and come meet the team!
Sheffield DocFest
Sheffield DocFest is the UK’s leading documentary festival and one of the world’s most influential markets for documentary projects.
The festival has a special place in our hearts. We took part in the brilliant MeetMarket back in 2020, where we met our sales agent and co-producer Dogwoof and other supporters who have joined us on this long journey. Made in Ethiopia was also a finalist in Sheffield staple the Whicker Awards in 2021, so it feels like something of a homecoming!
Two centuries after the city of Sheffield led Britain’s Industrial Revolution, Made in Ethiopia shows how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same, in our globalized world.
Sheffield is also no stranger to the mysteries of Chinese investment after a 60-year, £220m urban regeneration scheme signed in 2016 with a Chinese firm evaporated a couple of years later. We’re looking forward to some great discussion!
Encounters South African International Documentary Festival
Encounters South African International Documentary Festival is the country's premier event for showcasing local and international documentaries. It’s a crucial platform for promoting local talent, fostering industry networking, and enriching cultural dialogue.
We’re so happy to finally bring the film to African audiences, for whom it is arguably most relevant. China is by far South Africa’s biggest trading partner, and South Africa is one of the continent’s biggest recipients of Chinese investment. As Africa increasingly looks to China as a reference for its own development, we hope our film provides a focus for reflection and debate about the future of the world’s fastest-growing continent.
From directors Xinyan Yu and Max Duncan
We both worked as journalists in China for more than a decade each, immersed in the myriad stories of people navigating a rapidly-changing society. Having witnessed how industrialization profoundly impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of people, we wanted to explore how China’s growing presence in Africa was contributing to a similar transformation at a pivotal moment in the continent’s history. When we started the project in 2019, Ethiopia - a vibrant, ancient culture with millions still in grinding poverty - had adopted a developmental model strikingly similar to China’s and was buzzing with eye-popping examples of this fateful partnership. The Eastern Industry Park, and the extraordinary women we met there, offered a perfect microcosm to see how it all played out.
Growing up in Wuhan, a big industrial Chinese city, Xinyan experienced China’s upheaval first hand: much of her hometown, a state-owned steel factory community, was uprooted to make way for massive real estate projects. A lot of what China went through in the 80s and 90s - industrialization, urbanization and privatization of the economy - is now taking place in Ethiopia. These shared experiences help her understand the perspectives of both Chinese and Ethiopian characters.
Max, also the film’s director of photography, has focused on the promise and pain of development in his earlier short films. A fluent Mandarin speaker, he is driven by a belief in the power of human-centered storytelling to unlock subjects that may at first feel ‘remote’ to some audiences.
We teamed up with Tamara Dawit, an Ethiopian-Canadian producer working across documentary and fiction projects in Ethiopia and further afield. Her award-winning feature directorial debut Finding Sally delves deep into Ethiopia's modern history through the unraveling of an extraordinary family secret. Her creative input and experience have been central to the project.
From the outset, we wanted to make a film that explored layered tensions not just between Chinese and Ethiopians, but between rural and urban communities, men and women, and different generations with competing values and aspirations. We took a longitudinal approach - following our characters over four years through a global pandemic and a civil war - to see what changed, and what didn’t, for them and for Ethiopia. Above all, we wanted to show all the shades of gray, so that audiences can make their own judgment: who are the real winners and losers; what is a fair approach to development in the 21st century; and ultimately, what should we give up in the pursuit of progress?
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