![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.trigon-film.org\/en\/movies\/Lamb\/photos\/1200\/lamb_01.jpg\")
<\/p>\nReviewed by Martin Hutchinson. Viewed at the Lobero\u00a0Theater, Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yared Zeleke’s Lamb is a coming of age story about a young Ethiopian boy who is thrust into an uncertain and callous\u00a0situation. Like the bildungsroman of \u00a0the literary world, we follow the young protagonist Ephra\u00efm as he struggles to come to terms with his new place in the world.<\/p>\n
The film begins by sketching the relationship between young Ephra\u00efm and his beloved lamb. We learn early on that a disease has taken the life\u00a0Ephra\u00efm’s mother and his father decides to quit their ancestral village and move to the city to work. Unfortunately for\u00a0Ephra\u00efm, his father makes the\u00a0determination that for a proper upbringing he must have a surrogate mother and therefore\u00a0decides to leave\u00a0Ephra\u00efm 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\u00a0lamb for a holiday feast prompts him to search for a method to escape his relatives.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0and farming for males.\u00a0The film juxtaposes the closeted, packed nature of the relatives hut with the sweeping and majestic vistas of Ethiopian mountaintops to evoke\u00a0Ephra\u00efm’s struggle for freedom. We are encouraged\u00a0by these beautiful images to yearn\u00a0along with\u00a0Ephra\u00efm for a \u00a0more just and loving\u00a0environment. 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.<\/p>\n
This is Ethiopia’s first official selection to the Cannes Film Festival and it is a worthy recipient of that honor.\u00a0If you are patient enough with this film it may provide you with some insights into human nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Martin Hutchinson. Viewed at the Lobero\u00a0Theater, 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\u00a0situation. Like the bildungsroman of \u00a0the literary world, we follow the young protagonist Ephra\u00efm as he struggles to come to terms with his new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81295,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/81295"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}