DIRECTED BY ALAN MAGLIO AND MEDHIN PAOLOS
ASMARINA
Voices and images of a postcolonial heritage
Asmarina is a documentary film about the Habesha (Eritrean and Ethiopian) community in Milan that bridges the present life of this community to the historical legacies of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa.
The film makers’ approach to the Habesha life is not as outsiders but rather, as involved and invested members of this community.
DIRECTED BY ALAN MAGLIO
AND MEDHIN PAOLOS
ASMARINA
Voices and images of a postcolonial heritage
Asmarina is a documentary film about the Habesha (Eritrean and Ethiopian) community in Milan that bridges the present life of this community to the historical legacies of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa.
The film makers’ approach to the Habesha life is not as outsiders but rather, as involved and invested members of this community.
ABOUT ASMARINA
Reviews & Articles
Asmarina is about how a multigenerational black diasporic community forms, survives, and even thrives when the exclusionary logics of Fortress Europe would have one believe that it should not exist in the first place. The power of this move cannot be overstated at a moment in Europe when blackness has come to be synonymous with death.
Watching the film as a black American, I related to their struggle with a national narrative that often excludes their contributions to the national culture, as well as their deep longing for a place either they had never been or to which they cannot return. The point of no return is a place few peoples know.
I also like how in Asmarina music becomes an alternative space for the recognition of human relation, of ancestry, of history. So that It becomes a space that is resistant to the Nation that we usually think of, as being the actual venue for ideas of about home.