Lamb (Yared Zeleke, 2015): Ethiopia | France | Germany | Norway | Qatar

Reviewed by Martin Hutchinson. Viewed at the Lobero Theater, Santa Barbara.

Yared Zeleke’s Lamb is a coming of age story about a young Ethiopian boy who is thrust into an uncertain and callous situation. Like the bildungsroman of  the literary world, we follow the young protagonist Ephraïm as he struggles to come to terms with his new place in the world.

The film begins by sketching the relationship between young Ephraïm and his beloved lamb. We learn early on that a disease has taken the life Ephraïm’s mother and his father decides to quit their ancestral village and move to the city to work. Unfortunately for Ephraïm, his father makes the determination that for a proper upbringing he must have a surrogate mother and therefore decides to leave Ephraïm under the care of his in-laws, while he leaves to the city. The young protagonist is then forced to adapt to the unfamiliar relatives. His uncle would rather he learn how to run cattle than to cook, and his cousins resent the introduction of another child to divide their parents attention and exacerbate family tensions. The threat of the sacrifice of his darling lamb for a holiday feast prompts him to search for a method to escape his relatives.

The story is told and shot exclusively from the boy’s perspective as we would expect from a coming of age story. We (the viewer) see the boy’s struggles firsthand as he tries to navigate the Ethiopian gender roles of cooking for females and farming for males. The film juxtaposes the closeted, packed nature of the relatives hut with the sweeping and majestic vistas of Ethiopian mountaintops to evoke Ephraïm’s struggle for freedom. We are encouraged by these beautiful images to yearn along with Ephraïm for a  more just and loving environment. The film’s thematic material deals not only with aspirational feelings but also with harsh reality, and the compromises we make to those aspirations as part of growing up.

This is Ethiopia’s first official selection to the Cannes Film Festival and it is a worthy recipient of that honor. If you are patient enough with this film it may provide you with some insights into human nature.