Tamara Mariam Dawit is an Ethiopian-Canadian filmmaker based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where she runs the production company GobezMedia. Dawit also manages the Creative Producers Training Program which supports the development, training, and export of Ethiopian film and music content. She directed the 2014 short film “Grandma Knows Best” and is currently producing the feature documentary “Qeerroo” and the feature drama the “Last Tears of the Deceased.” Dawit has produced documentary and digital content for CBC News, MTV, Radio-Canada, Discovery, NHK, and Al Jazeera, among other networks. She is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and the Film Fatales.

“Finding Sally” was scheduled to screen at the 2020 Hot Docs Canadian International Film Festival. A digital version of the fest has been organized due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Finding Sally” will screen in Hot Docs Festival Online, which will launch May 28 and is geo-blocked to Ontario, Canada. More information about the program and how to tune in can be found here.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

TMD: This film is my exploration of secrets in my family as well as the impact the mass killings following the 1970s revolution had on all Ethiopians. The catalyst for the film was when I found out I had an aunt that my family had never told me about. As such, the film follows my investigation into Sally, her life, and why it is painful for my relatives to discuss her.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

TMD: I have always been interested in Ethiopian history and specifically the activism and ideology of the student movement in the 1960s and ’70s.

I’ve also been drawn to telling stories about Ethiopian women, but when you read about that period in Ethiopian history, you don’t hear much about women or their role. You just hear about women being around to do the cooking or because she was the wife or girlfriend of this person. So, it wasn’t until I found out about Sally and her role as an activist in the 1970s in Ethiopia that I really started to think about making a film about the revolution and the Red Terror that followed.

With that in mind, I was also very specific and focused on only including Ethiopian women as characters and voices in the film. So that meant not interviewing any academics — all of whom were male — or any of Sally’s male comrades. Not because they didn’t have important and meaningful memories, but really because we never hear from women and we never view this history from a female perspective, and I think that was important.

W&H: What do you want people to think about after they watch the film? 

TMD: The film explores the culture of silence surrounding the Red Terror that has existed within my own family and across Ethiopia. It looks at how this is affecting the country’s struggles today for democracy, critical thought, and freedom of speech. My film asks Ethiopians to learn from our past in order to have a more peaceful and united future.

I think for non-Ethiopian audiences, the film in an opportunity to hear about contemporary Ethiopian history from Ethiopians directly and not from a news anchor or academic talking head. I think this context is important to understand why there are so many Ethiopians living in North America or Western Europe and what the circumstances were that drove many people to have to flee the country.

Also, we should recognize the context of what most audiences already know or don’t know about Ethiopia and their Ethiopian neighbors. The image many people have is largely one only of famine. This is one of the many negative impacts of the work of BandAid and LiveAid in the 1980s. Most people don’t know that that famine in 1983 and 1984 was largely man-made because of the policies and war being waged in Northern Ethiopia by the then military government. “Finding Sally” is set a few years earlier, but it explores the earlier horrific policies of the same dictatorship.

So hopefully this film can help interest people in learning more and dissecting the information they have already received.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

TMD: I think the biggest piece of work was that I spent years researching about Sally’s life and tracking down people who had known here in the ’60s and ’70s. I did that for years before I decided this was going to be a film. So, this meant tracking down her friends and old boyfriends from her life in Canada – some who didn’t want to talk to me – as well as researching and finding the living members of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party, the communist group that Sally had joined in Ethiopia.

This was really a snowball effect of finding one person, gaining their trust, getting information and then being introduced to someone else and then so on. Some people may see this as a challenge, but to me it was simply part of the journey.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

TMD: “Finding Sally” was funded totally in Canada through grants, broadcaster support, tax credits, and federal funds. Of course, we also tried to access international funds via co-production and film funds, but in the end we were lucky to raise money to produce the film in Canada.

I think the fact that the money was raised in Canada is very significant. If you look at the few numbers of slots available with both broadcasters and funders in Canada – it is very hard to cut through. And then when you look further at the data — or lack of data — around how many projects are being funded or commissioned that are directed people of color at the funding levels we hit, there are very few.

Now I am entering the second stage of fundraising for the impact campaign and distribution of the film targeting Ethiopians in Ethiopian and in the diaspora. For me that is where the important work sits as that is the audience I really made the film for.

W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?

TMD: I’ve always been drawn to sharing stories through art. I’ve worked in the music industry, theater, and in international development on media and digital campaigns, but all of that work was really grounded in sharing stories and new perspectives. I think transition into film came naturally.

I would say that I have been driven to provide a platform through all of my work for Ethiopian stories to be told on the global stage by Ethiopians. I was really tired of watching the many documentaries and dramatic films written and directed by Western filmmakers who come to Ethiopia with a Western lens which changes and often perverts the story they are telling.

That is why now much of my work is focused on producing Ethiopian filmmakers, adapting Ethiopian films, and making sure that content produced in Ethiopia is exported and highlighted globally.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

TMD: I think the consistently worst advice I get is to put yourself in the film – that people will not want to watch a film about Ethiopia without being able to connect to you as a Western character. That happened in “Finding Sally” and was really the only way to finance the film — it made more sense in this film since it is a story about my family, so it could be logical to hear about that story from my point of view. But I’ve been told that same advice by producers and commissioning editors in Canada for other projects that are not at all about my point of view and for which the idea is really ridiculous.

I’ve also seen Ethiopian directors that I produce be given the same advice to put a white or Western character into their story. I think as an industry, we need to realize that we are for more global and that film audiences can be interested in a film told from the point of view of an African character’s vs. a North American character. Essentially this is really narrow-minded and lazy advice to be telling filmmakers who are writing and directing content in the Global South.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

TMD: I think that my advice is directed more specifically at directors from equity-seeking groups. You have to stick to your guns, so to speak, in order to be able to create the type of content you intend to which best reflects your specific point of view, community, and experience. I find that my career as a filmmaker is not necessarily challenging because I am a woman but is more challenging as a person of color. A lot of doors have been starting to open up for women to make films, accessing financing, have their work programmed — but those opportunities and access often only benefit White women, something which was clearly highlighted through a report on equity released at Sundance.

So I think until there is more equality throughout the film industry, filmmakers like myself should use our voices — muted as they may be — to demand more access, representations, and space to tell our stories, and also more control and ownership of the Intellectual Property (IP) of our stories. We often lose our power when we are required to turn over the ownership of our works to production companies who do not come from our communities and thus understand and fight for the same storytelling agenda that we may have. So, in a nutshell, I would tell other filmmakers to keep fighting the fight.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

TMD: I’m not sure that I have a favorite film by a female director, but one of my favorite director’s that happens to be a woman is Deepa Mehta. I first encountered her films as a teenager at an art house cinema in Ottawa. I used to visit to take a long bus ride from the suburbs into downtown Ottawa each weekend to watch various art house and foreign language films.

I loved “Fire” and “Earth” equally and then years later “Water” for their ability to draw you into important stories, characters, and moments in Indian history.

I also appreciate her commitment as a member of the Indian diaspora to keep telling through her specific lens’s Indian stories.

W&H: How are you adjusting to life during the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you keeping creative, and if so, how?

TMD: Due to COVID-19, I have a full shut down of paying work as a producer since nothing is being shot right now, but since I normally work from home and have a home office, it hasn’t been a huge adjustment.

Nonetheless, I am keeping busy with research and writing for a new film. I am also doing an online program with Good Pitch to work on the impact campaign and distribution for “Finding Sally” in Ethiopia and taking part in an online lab with Torino for a new film I am producing.

I’m keeping busy with writing, research, and way too many Zoom calls, but also trying to do some more self-care things like baking, cooking new dishes, gardening on my patio, and yoga.