Andy Siege’s film is a low budget wonder with puzzling politics.
There is a sense in which Andy Siege’s Beti and Amare can be construed as miraculous. Created with a $14,000 budget, Siege’s film is a visual spectacle transcending its economics.
It opens with a title card, ‘Addis Ababa at war’. A footage shows Mussolini; he has declared war. Ethiopia is the only African country yet to be colonised, a character later explains, and the Italian wants to conquer the state. This is the political landscape to which Beti, a young woman, is thrust.
Hiwot Asres, playing Beti, is a dour delight and carrying the film – and at one point, her co-star – she has to be.
Beti, like the film, is a low-budget beauty. With pale skin, overlapping teeth and dishevelled hair, Asres embodies her land: an entity ravaged by war circumstance and yet ravishing.
Beti comes to live with her grandfather in the middle of Nowhere, Ethiopia. She is harassed by three young men parading the land as militia and then offered marriage by same. Her granddad declines, irking the young men. But then has to travel for food supplies.
While he’s gone, Beti comes across a luminous egg dropped from the sky. The ‘baby’ is white, the size of a male adult and has very prominent canines; you know, like a vampire. The militia will return and this being defying taxonomy will be waiting, learning Amharic, hunting and acquiring the name Amare.
The racial politics of Beti and Amare is puzzling: an African country is invaded, albeit unsuccessfully, by a European country, as a young woman is protected by a white alien from a black militia. It is possible to see the plot as indicting of all races; yet a note of ambivalence is perceptible: ambivalence to the apportioning of blame on the encroaching of a sovereign African land by whites, and then a balancing out of the evil of colonisation by a small, personal act of kindness.
The film is sure to be interpreted according to culture. European audiences may see the central events as evidence of Beti repressing trauma visited on her by the militia; African audiences, with a strong spiritual background, will be more accepting of the possibility of a non-human protector.
In the end, Andy Siege succeeds visually, spectacularly, especially. But his politics remains troubling.
• Aigbokhaevbolo is a Lagos-based film critic.
