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AINSLEE ROBSON

FOCUS ON ETHIOPIA
Sun, Feb 22 · 7:15 PM · The Main (Screening)

BEFF 2026 special closing event: a celebration of a new generation of Ethiopian and Ethiopian American filmmakers. Screening starts at 7:15pm, join us for the closing reception and award ceremony at 6pm.

FERENJ: A Graphic Memoir in VR (2020)

Ferenj is a visual dialogue between memory, reality, and the digital in an afrosurreal dreamscape crafted from the director’s reconstructed childhood memories. The viewer is guided through fragments of her parents’ Ethiopian restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio, the house where she grew up, and scenes from the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia by a speculative one-way conversation between the narrator and Empress Taytu (the restaurant personified as the actual historical empress) with a backdrop of Ethio Jazz hits from the 60s and 70s. The viewer ultimately floats through a world in which memories are bound together in an impossible geography, coexisting in resistance to their impossibility. Ferenj is a form of emancipatory thought and resistance to othering, reclaiming the director’s Ethiopian-American, biracial identity, and redefining boundaries between fragmented memories and the digital imaginary.

Director: Ainslee Alem Robson is an Ethiopian-American writer-director, media artist and cook who crafts emancipatory narratives and counterimaginings harnessing film, game engine technology, food, memory and archives as her ingredients. Refusing temporal linearity, Ainslee’s work speaks to the liminal spaces between Africa and its diasporas. Scrutinizing sites of erasure within hegemonic discourse, she aims to deconstruct hierarchies and colonial legacies while re-orienting emerging technologies to operate in service to, and from positions of Black consciousness. Juxtaposing both emerging and analog media, she crafts characters, worlds, and meals that center agency, reclamation, resistance and spice.

Ainslee has exhibited her film installation “Ferenj” in the “Guests From the Future” category at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Lesley Lokko. Amongst other art spaces her commissions and collaborations have been exhibited by MoMA, the New York Times, Ars Electronica, MU, and Vellum LA.