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The Journey

By Michael Quin

Befekir Kebede is a very busy man. It’s hard work, after all, convincing Australians there’s more to his Ethiopian culture than the famine two decades ago. But it’s this impetus to crystallize his culture for others that has fuelled his film-making, photography, and online projects since arriving here from Ethiopia in 1997.

Today he’s found time to share his lunch with me in Melbourne’s Fortyfive Downstairs gallery, surrounded by his photographs and paintings from two other Ethiopian-Australians, and talk about his latest documentary, The Journey.

“The idea of the film is to capture the spirit of the three of us working together towards this exhibition. At the same time it’s about showing Ethiopian culture and art,” he explains.

Befekir shot his 15-minute film over six months in various locations around Melbourne. It is to be screened at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image on July 4 and 6, with four other short films in the Emerge Festival’s Stories of an African Australia.

The festival, conceived by Multicultural Arts Victoria, uses the accessibility of film as a way for artists from migrant communities to get an audience in the wider community.

Project officer Anita Larkin works with newly arrived communities, helping them find pathways into the arts. She says for Melbourne’s African communities these projects are especially important because their culture is still so underrepresented in the wider Victorian community.

“The African communities are the biggest new arrivals in recent years,” she says, “Yet to date they’re still relatively invisible to people, because they’re a recent community and they often stay in their areas. So a lot of people haven’t had any exposure to their culture, and these films will be a good introduction. It’s about giving voice to people from these new migrant and refugee communities. They have a story to tell, and often about issues people might not be aware of,” she says.

The Emerge Festival will present Befekir with an opportunity to address the issue of distorted cultural representation, and allow him to interrogate his largest audience yet with his favourite question: What do you know, or think you know, about Ethiopia?

“The majority say they know absolutely nothing,” he says, “If anything, it was famine, maybe some Ethiopian runners, nothing else. In the movie I want to show that not a lot of Australians know about Ethiopia. But we exist. And the community and Ethiopia itself is completely different from what people think it is.”

Befekir presents his subjects as gifts to the audience. Each element of Melbourne’s Ethiopian culture we are shown – the colourful clothes, angelic children at community events, beautiful girls, successful artists and scholars, a community in action, his mother’s smile – are shown to be gifts the Victorian community would do well to recognise they have. For Befekir, his work is also about challenging stereotypes.

“I like my culture, my background. And I don’t like the fact that people haven’t got a proper understanding of where I come from. Or I don’t like the fact that people have a distorted understanding. For example, I tend to take a lot of photographs of Ethiopian children, for two reasons. Firstly, because they look beautiful. But secondly, it’s because people are not used to seeing Ethiopian children in this kind of manner. The media talk about the famine, and they show Ethiopian children suffering. But this is the other picture of Ethiopian kids,” he says.

The visual arts exhibition at the centre of The Journey is a collaboration between himself and two Ethiopian-Australian painters: Sutueal Bekele and Tamirat Gebremariam.

The effect of entering the gallery surrounded by their work is potent: it’s all vibrant earthy colours – reds, yellows, greens – and African eyes. Sutueal tells me his work plays with many styles but for this exhibition he took it back to more traditional roots, full of religious iconography. It contrasts with the work of Tamirat, who’s taken a more contemporary inspiration for the exhibition. Facing each other across the gallery, and with Befekir’s photographic portraits on the other two walls, they make a strong statement of Ethiopian-Australian identity.

The collaboration has been significant, beyond its visual impact, as the first Ethiopian-Australian exhibition of its kind in Melbourne’s CBD.

Until now, exhibitions like this have been confined to suburbs where African communities are concentrated, but Befekir has brought Ethiopian culture to the centre of Melbourne in his exhibition, and now onto the big screen with his film depicting the journey to come this far.

The five films in Stories of an African Australia promise audiences insights into some of the perspectives of our most recent migrant communities.

They’re perspectives rarely heard in Australian film, and for that alone mark an important milestone in the journey of Australian cinema’s representation of our diverse community.

For Befekir it’s just another step in the journey he says he’s been on “forever”.

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