Our film club finished up our latest cycle last week. So before we begin again, we all make a pick for our short-film festival. I won’t offer any comments here about the other picks (which were all enjoyable to watch); just some thoughts on mine.
Last Friday, before our Zoom film club, I was coming back from a conference in Tampa, when we stopped at a rest stop on I-75 just past Paynes Prairie.
To me, a prairie means dry grasslands, without trees, but possibly plenty of gophers. Of course, that isn’t the case in Florida. There’s plenty of water, and it resembles a swamp from the interstate.
As we’re pulling into the rest stop, I see people gathered along a chain-link fence separating the rest stop from a storm-water retention pond. An alligator has everyone’s attention.
We get out of the car and walk over to a 7- to 8-foot gator about a yard away — on the other side of the fence. (Yes, gators can climb fences, but by my calculations, I could run faster than it could climb.)
The night before, I had sampled several short films that were streaming on the Criterion Channel, but the encounter with the gator cinched my pick: Hairat.
This 2017 short, by Ethiopian-Mexican filmmaker Jessica Beshir, spends just six minutes with Yussuf Mume Saleh, who, for over 35 years, has been feeding the wild hyenas outside Harar’s city walls.
Encountering the gator reminded me of how close we all live to nature, but that we don’t take the time to notice. We’re often too busy going about our day-to-day lives to give nature and the creatures around us much thought. But Saleh makes it a regular part of his days.
A poem of love and loss written and recited by Elias Shagiz Adonay Tesfaye accompanies black-and-white images of Saleh and the hyenas as they dance their nightly feeding ritual.
Be sure to watch the interview with director Beshir, which is part of the Hairat collection on Criterion. She provides a wonderful story of how she came about making the film.