Telling the Story of Ethiopia’s Red Terror Through a Family Artifact

“I often find a lot of documentaries and films, especially pertaining to war and/or Africa, to be shrouded with a bleakness and hopelessness,” the filmmaker Ruth Hunduma says. “That is not how I see Africa, and that is not how I see Ethiopia. Ethiopia is a deeply mystical, beautiful, and complex land.” Her film “The Medallion” is an attempt to communicate that beauty and complexity, while addressing the national tragedy of the Red Terror genocide of the nineteen-seventies. Hunduma’s mother, Tsehay Ayele, lived through the Red Terror, and in the film she shares dark details of surviving atrocities. The film, made in 2022, while the Tigray war was being fought in Ethiopia, recalls the terror of that past while also highlighting the joyful and warm community that Ayele has now. Hunduma wanted the film to bring to light a history that was never given its due. “As the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants, it not only profoundly bothered me that our tragedy was silenced but the notion that it spoke to the larger silencing of global tragedies, particularly in the West, made it all the more disquieting.”