Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker, Jessica Beshir, has crafted a film that rests between documentary and dream, using aspects of her own biography (Beshir was forced to leave her hometown of Harar as a result of political turmoil) to more attentively guide her filmmaking into various communities across the city, all connected by Khat.
Filmed with expressive sensitivity in monochrome, the hauntingly composed imagery begin to approach a trance-like meditation; the incidental and intimate become intoxicated vessels through which spirituality is encountered.
Neither a film about drug culture or a nostalgic ode to her hometown, Faya Dayi instead provides the rare insight of a documentary that transcends its form, conjuring a deeply felt work of investigation as ambient poetry.