Growing Pains in Ethiopia: Film Spotlights Hidden Cost of Urban Growth

Mo Scarpelli was interviewed by Reuters about her film, Anbessa.

Living in a tool shed on the outskirts of Ethiopia’s capital, 10-year-old Asalif Tewold straddles a unique space between modernity and tradition.

In his short life, he has lived on a rural farm and in the shadows of a towering condominium complex - learning how to dodge dangerous hyenas and land developers - as he and his dispossessed family try to find a place to call home.

The young boy and his mother are the subject of the film “Anbessa”, meaning “lion” in Amharic, one of Ethiopia’s main languages, that tracks their displacement off farmland to make way for a block of flats on the fringes of Addis Ababa.

The playful protagonist, Asalif, takes center stage of the documentary by U.S. filmmaker Mo Scarpelli, premiering in London on Wednesday at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival - as he lives and plays in the looming shadow of the buildings.

“Asalif is the perfect person ... he lives literally on the rift of old and new,” Scarpelli told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Anbessa” follows Asalif over two years as he seeks to ward off roaming hyenas both literally in the forest and in the form of lurking land developers.