Review: ‘Faya Dayi’ observes rural Ethiopia and the crop that transfixes its people

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Filmmaker Jessica Beshir’s bending, swaying nonfiction journey “Faya Dayi” explores rural Ethopia by way of the production and consumption of the chewable narcotic leaf called khat — an approach not in the traditional manner of an issue documentary or informational travelogue, however, but as a state of mind to be received. That drug, in other words, called cinema. Yes, there are harvesters, packagers and users speaking to us, and a camera that captures a community dependent on and wary of its grip. Yet in eschewing directness of intent for the artful massaging of space, sound and rhythm, Beshir’s film — a very personal project for the Mexican Ethiopian director, which she shot over 10 years — stakes a richer claim to our sense of the place and the effect of its most lucrative crop.

The black-and-white photography is tenderly textured even in its starkness, as evocative with a diaphanous curtain in sunlight as with people working at night, and the nature all around them. It’s also a melancholic indicator, however, that while this is a beautiful culture, it’s in the grip of a monochrome economy that’s swallowing everyone. “Everyone chews to get away,” one boy’s voice-over tells us. “Their flesh is here but their soul is gone.” The bustle of khat’s reaping in the fields, bundling in packed warehouses and selling on the streets is — not unlike the plant’s stimulating effects — one source of energy in the film, while interiors with transfixed chewers and ritualized users (it’s been a Sufi pathway to transcendence for centuries) create another mood entirely.

The heartbeat of Beshir’s film, though, is with its wandering young narrators — people looking for a way out of a homeland they love and worry for. Her threading of their collective searching presence, like lonely guides navigating an encompassing, self-medicated haze, is what gives “Faya Dayi” its dignifying, transfixing intimacy and what renders it unlike any other documentary you’re likely to see.