Young German documentary filmmaker Sarah Noa Bozenhardt has been at the Berlin Festival this week as part of the Face To Face With German Films event highlighting seven up-and-coming young German talents. It was also gave Bozenhardt the opportunity to talk up her recent film Among Us Women, which is sold by Taskovski Films and which premiered last year in the DOK Leipzig International Competition .
Bozenhardt may be German (she was born in Freiburg) but she spent much of her childhood in Ethiopia. As she also revealed to Business Doc Europe, she also grew up with strong links to the circus.
“My parents, they started working on a youth exchange group between a German circus group for children and a circus [in] Ethiopia,” the director explains. When she was five years old, she remembers circus groups from Ethiopia coming to Germany to work on their routines and to tour the country. German circus performers went in the opposite direction, training and giving shows in Africa. That was why, when she was still very young, she started travelling to Ethiopia.
And, yes, she was involved in the circus world herself. “I was always the little child who toured around. They taught me a lot of these circus moves, acrobatics and juggling.” No, she can’t walk on tightropes but she knows how to ride a unicycle and did “a lot of gymnastics, a lot of dance.”
Can she still ride the unicycle today? “I should try. I don’t know…I’ve got a bit rusty I am sure.”
It was fun, but building a new life for herself in Africa also had its challenges. “When we moved permanently [to Ethiopia], I was about 12 years old. That transition for me was quite challenging, although I really knew a lot of people and had a lot of friends.”
Bozenhardt was obliged to leave behind all her connections back home in Germany. “At the same time, it has formed and influenced who I have become as a woman and a filmmaker.”
Her documentary Among Us Women, billed as “a story of birth and the complex power of women’s companionship,” is about midwives in Ethiopia.
“When I was studying filmmaking in Canada, I started looking at what kind of places existed in the community that are dominantly led by women or shared by women. Midwifery was the space I found in Ethiopian culture where it is very clear that the woman is in charge. When she gives the order, everybody else follows and obeys.”
In what is otherwise a patriarchal society, the director adds, “everything is switched on its head” when it comes to the midwives. They call the shots.
One reason why Bozenhardt was so drawn to characters like Welela Assaye, the leading midwife at the Amijaye Health Centre, and Endal Gedif, an older, more traditional midwife, was a grim incident in her own past when she was sexually assaulted.
“It [the documentary] is definitely rooted in this experience…but much more than that assault itself, it was for me the safe spaces I found with fellow girls at the time and later women in Ethiopia. These spaces gave me so much strength to move past [the experience]. These spaces are very powerful,” she underlines.
Bozenhardt co-directed her film with the Ethiopian-born Daniel Abate Tilahun whom she has known for 15 years. She describes him as a close part of her family, “almost a brother.”
Shooting was completed just before the pandemic began. The editing was then done during the Covid period.
“It was a necessity for us to share the film with the participants before we shared it with anybody else,” the director explains why she travelled back to Ethiopia last summer to show the film. The pandemic stopped her and Daniel from organising a big community screening but they were able to show the documentary individually to its main protagonists. “They were extremely proud to see themselves and to be acknowledged in that way.”
The doc has been well received in DOK Leipzig , where its received an Honorary Mention, and at the Cork Festival. The aim now is to take it back to Ethiopia for the Addis Ababa Film Festival later this summer. Bozenhardt and her producer Sonja Kilbertus are submitting the film to further festivals and developing an impact campaign for its release in Ethiopia.
ZDF and several German film funds backed the film. “We were actually, for a graduation project, quite well funded, but because of its international context and the equal pay we demanded for all of our crew members, it [the money] is still never enough!”
One goal now is to find a sales agent. Bozenhardt is so immersed in the distribution of Among Us Women that she hasn’t had time to put other projects into the pipeline.
The film was a painstaking affair and Bozenhardt has spent several years bringing it to fruition. “For documentary, I feel we need more security…it has been six years of my life and I was hardly paid. It was really a challenge to sustain [myself] and to stay mentally healthy in that context. These I think are two big issues we need to tackle. It is much easier to predict in a fiction film how much time you will need to invest in the shooting process.” the director ends.
