Ethiopia’s eastern plateau — where the rainy mountains slowly ease into scrubland and arid Somali plains — is khat country. The plant, prized in a social context for its stimulating and euphoric effects, has been grown, collected, and chewed by the Oromo people of the region long before their homeland was known for its coffee. In her black sheep debut documentary Faya Dayi, Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir explores this milieu with a delicate eye, probing at the sounds and textures of the highland through khat’s hyper-sensory filter. Sharpened by a new pharmacological frame of mind, Faya Dayi accesses a consciousness of a higher order, touching on a highly spiritual notion of community and the patchwork quilt, at once fragmented and whole, that defines it.
Faya Dayi’s unorthodox approach to documentary eschews most narrative in favor of a collection of feelings expressed visually. Its mimetic relationship to the experience of khat–chewing results in a camera under the influence, immersed in a stretched sense of time and a heightened awareness of space and texture: dappled light, swirling smoke, and the grain of fabrics mesh into a serene visual language. More striking is the film’s sound design, composing a rich orchestra of ambient noise out of the so-called silence of nature; when a chorus of khat farmers joins the rustling leaves, singing birds, croaking frogs, and clicking insects, there’s an unmistakable feeling of joyous communion. Though born of an escapist intention — ”everyone chews to get away,” one man laments — the camera’s absorption into a highly sensory world offers the viewer an experience of the granular, creating tactile interest in the threshold between nature and humankind. To retreat and to immerse: this is, after all, what the movies are for.
Beshir’s approach to a haptic semi-dream state provides, however, far more than a bodily experience. By establishing a foundation of non-narrative and sensory documentary, she is able to tap into the spiritual elements that structure community life within and beyond the material day-to-day. In other words, by replicating khat-chewing’s intoxicating effects on screen, Beshir asserts to her viewer that they have departed from the realm of the purely rational to access a new, higher (pun intended) form of consciousness. This world takes a form similar to memory: myths are recited over images of running water and craftswomen’s working hands; disembodied voices read letters to one another, professing love and longing, addressing each other by name in the curious absence of image; ambient Pater Noster William Basinski’s lush, resonant score pours a warm tone over the whole thing. There is an assertive slowness here, one that, despite its occasionally oppressive weight (the film could, frankly, lose about 30 minutes), captures the viewer in the film’s mist like a steeping tea bag.
The logic of these sequences leans more commemorative than dreamlike, presenting nothing irreal per se. But through its transcendent visual and sonic language, Faya Dayi whispers a declaration: this is not a film about khat at all, but about the spiritual core that connects the people who have made it a part of their lives. The drifting light, the smoke, the rustling leaves, and the discorporate narration all merge into some kind of unifying concept in the representation of a community writ large. The effect is one of a spiritual stock-pot, the individual memories and feelings of each man, woman, and child diffusing together into a sacred whole much greater than the sum of its parts, the khat plant serving only as a vehicle to access this higher resonance. This is beautiful and revelatory documentary filmmaking: Beshir crafts a portrait of the Oromo khat planters and the touchstones of their material and spiritual lives whose intimacy feels like a true blessing. With this triumphant debut feature, Beshir positions herself as the tapper of a great, communal tree: when the cuts are made and the spile driven, Faya Dayi, with all its splendid effluvium, is the sap that flows out.
