It was, says Teboho Edkins, “a film I didn’t want to make”. On 10 March 2019, Edkins’ brother, Max, was among the 157 people killed when Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 crashed minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa airport.
For Teboho, making a documentary about the disaster seemed impossible: “It’s not a sexy subject. At first, I really didn’t want to do it at all.”
For the brothers’ father, the film-maker and anti-apartheid activist Don Edkins, the idea had come earlier. “The one therapy session I went to, the therapist said: ‘Try to use your creative talent to deal with this, to help with the grieving process.’ And so I started making a film.”
An Open Field, a short documentary directed by Teboho and produced by Don, is all about grief, told through the rural Orthodox Christian Tewahedo community, who live on the land where the plane came down.
“They have a very structured process of mourning,” Don says. “We felt that was very interesting because it helped us in our own mourning to understand what mourning meant to them.”
In the years afterwards, Don would visit the crash site annually. “I got quite close to the community,” he says. “They would come in their hundreds for the anniversary to grieve with us. So I really got a feeling that they were very close to us.We just wanted to explore that – how and why that happened.”
In the tiny village near Ejerie town, about 28 miles from the airport, 40 days of mourning follow a death, says Don, after which, anniversaries of the deceased are marked for seven years. Then the official period of mourning is over. “That’s when the healing starts taking place,” he says. “So they mourn very openly, for a very strong reason.”
The mechanics of this mourning process happen early on in the film with a funeral taking place years after the crash. Men stand outside their homes singing, banging kebero drums and rattling tsenatsel shakers. One man sings as he sits and reads the Bible; then dozens pour on to the streets, some holding pictures of the deceased. They cry, wail and shout, possessed by their grief.
“The film is a documentation of an encounter and two different kinds of grieving,” says Teboho. But while An Open Field is an inherently personal account, it is less about the Edkins family than grief itself. “It is quite minimal. I tried to not make it very dramatic and emotional. I tried to withdraw myself from it as much as possible,” says Teboho.
“It was not meant to be a personal psychological project. It was meant to be a film that speaks to people who don’t know us either.”
The documentary uses raw footage and interviews from the father and son’s visit alongside photographs, news clips and text. “Sound is really important in the film,” says Teboho. “We use lots of field recordings, we create layers that are not necessarily of the moment when you see the picture – to create sound that is expressive and shows what I’m feeling, rather than what I’m actually listening to.”
In one scene, the film-makers meet the security guard assigned to protect the crash site, which is, as Don describes it, “a living graveyard”. When the plane hit the ground, the impact created a 10-metre deep, 40-metre long and 28-metre wide crater. Wreckage was found 300 metres away.
“After the crash, he [the guard] went around for weeks picking up pieces of bodies,” says Teboho. The guard describes a forensic expert coming to the site and explaining which parts of the body the bone remnants came from – a piece of skull or arm, for example.
“That brings about talking about death and us understanding that he’s a guardian of our bones and our loved ones,” Teboho says. “So we understand his role, and we understand what happened.”
For the grieving relatives, the demand for justice from Boeing, the manufacturer of the 737 Max airliner, remains unresolved.
The Ethiopian Airlines tragedy was the second disaster involving a Boeing 737 Max jet, coming months after Lion Air flight JT610 crashed in Indonesia in October 2018, killing 189 people. Both disasters were linked to MCAS, an automated flight-control system that could repeatedly push the aircraft’s nose down.
For families, the years that followed deepened the feeling that the dead had been failed by the aircraft manufacturer, and later by the justice system. As they continued to fight for a public reckoning over who knew what, and when, and why the plane was allowed to fly, they watched Boeing apologise, settle cases and pay penalties.
This thread is approached in different ways by the film-makers. “Don comes from more of an activist background,” says Teboho. “He wanted to [look at] corporate greed and corruption. I am an abstract film-maker and wanted to find solace while making the film. Part of the tension of the project was: is it a film about Boeing or not?”
Don’s sense of social justice is seen most strongly in the scene where he interviews the father of the plane’s pilot, Yared Getachew. Dr Getachew Tessema, a surgeon, claims company interest ranks people below profit.
Getachew accuses Boeing of trying to shift blame on to the pilots after the crash. “They insisted to push [blame] to the captains, because they can’t defend themselves. They are dead.”
Teboho says there was a racist element to the response too, from the western media. “It’s like: ‘African airline, African pilots, obviously they’ll fuck up.’”
The Edkins combine many roles in the film: they are not only a grieving family, but documentarians, journalists and campaigners too. “It’s a story that we’re uniquely positioned to tell,” says Teboho. “We didn’t watch the whole thing happen. We just felt it.”
A spokesperson for Boeing said: “We will never forget the lives lost on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610 and their loved ones.
“Their memory and the hard lessons we learned from these accidents drive us every day to uphold our responsibility to all who depend on the safety and quality of our products.”
