Movie Review: Michael O'Sullivan on 'Teza'

It's reasonable to assume that some viewers will approach "Teza" with trepidation. After all, the Amharic-language, Ethiopian-set drama by Washington-based filmmaker Haile Gerima practically cries out for a bit of pre-screening homework, leapfrogging as it does between 1974, the 1980s and 1990 during a time of complex politics and civil war under the reign of dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam. So a bit of anxiety among the more history-phobic is understandable. Understandable, but unnecessary.

That's because "Teza" isn't about politics at all. Sure, it's helpful to possess a modicum of background about late-20th-century Ethiopia, which successfully fought off Italian attempts at colonization only to fall under the rule -- and eventual class inequities -- of Emperor Haile Selassie from 1930 to 1974. But it's the movie's powerful personal story -- of one man's loss and reconciliation -- that carries the viewer along.

Though "Teza" opens in 1990, it's told mainly through a series of flashbacks, beginning in 1974 with the overthrow of Selassie by a Marxist junta and then following Mengistu's violent rise to power. But the film's focus is Anberber (Aaron Arefe), a soft-spoken hero who sets the narrative in motion by returning to his childhood village in 1990 as a gray-bearded doctor with a medical degree, a missing leg and unexplained nightmares.

"Teza" is the tale of how he got that way.

A stand-in of sorts for the Ethiopian-born Gerima, who has called modern-day Ethiopia a "nightmare for me," Anberber leaves his homeland in the early 1970s to study medicine in Germany. Like many young men of the time, he's a socialist and can't wait to see Selassie toppled. But more important, Anberber is an idealist. His dream is to one day return home and, with friend and fellow student Tesfaye (Abeye Tedla), help their country eradicate all disease.

Easier said than done.

By the time they get back to Ethiopia, Mengistu the conquering hero has become a brutal thug. The country is at war, with both the government and the opposition forcibly conscripting young boys as soldiers, and shooting them when they try to run away. Dissent is quashed by imprisonment or, worse, the barrel of a gun.

In that atmosphere, Anberber feels like a stranger in his own land. He returns to Germany in an abortive attempt to deliver some bad news about Tesfaye to his friend's wife and son. But even there, in a shocking confrontation with a bunch of racist gang-bangers, Anberber finds that a black man isn't wholly welcome in the West either.

He is, in other words, a man without a country.

Though fictionalized, there's a lot of geographical and historical specificity to "Teza." Gerima clearly means to tell a story about Ethiopia, as he knows it. But it's not merely about Ethiopia.

Who hasn't gone home only to find that the place where he or she grew up -- which may never have existed the way we remember it anyway -- gone? It's a well-worn theme, familiar to readers of Thomas Wolfe.

In the end, "Teza" isn't complicated at all. At the beginning of the movie, we see a group of Ethiopian youngsters playing the traditional riddle game enkokilish. "I saw it when I left," one of the players says. "When I came back, it was gone." The others then try to guess what he's talking about. Rain? Love? Life? Childhood?

The answer, it turns out, is dew (teza, in Amharic). Yet in Gerima's powerfully universal meditation on the loss of his homeland -- on the inevitability of loss in general -- it may as well have been "all of the above."

Teza (140 minutes, at the Avalon) is not rated, but contains violence, brief obscenity and a scene of near nudity. In Amharic, German and English with subtitles.