Crumbs (dir. Miguel Llansó, Ethiopia)
Miguel Llansó drops viewers head first into a striking post-apocalyptic Ethiopia in what he has dubbed as the country’s inaugural “post-apocalyptic, surreal, sci-fi feature length film.” The Spanish-born, Addis Ababa-based filmmaker introduces us to an equal parts stunning and bizarre landscape that is barely inhabited but replete with peculiar happenings in its 68-minute runtime.
Daniel Tadesse and Selam Tesfaye play the roles of what appear to be the sole occupants of this stunning, inexplicable place—save for a witch, a greedy pawn shop clerk, a masked Nazi uniform-clad individual, an Ethio-Santa, and just a couple others who survived the “big war.”
A once dormant spaceship in the sky begins to show signs of activity and this glimmer of hope is enough to make Tadesse’s Gagano embark on a quest to find a way for he and his lover to travel back to his home planet. He longs for more than a life of sleeping in a defunct bowling alley and collecting paraphernalia of past civilizations to get by—like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles amulet and a copy of Michael Jackson’s “Dangerous” on vinyl—so he confronts his fears in search of something better.
-Neyat Yohannes
