#350 - Jessica Beshir on the Importance of Myth, Circularity, and Nostalgia in Faya Dayi

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a Q&A from the 50th New Directors/New Films with Jessica Beshir on her hypnotic documentary feature, Faya Dayi. In Faya Dayi, Beshir returns to her hometown of Harar and explores the coexistence of everyday life and its mythical undercurrents in the city, its rural Oromo community of farmers, and the harvesting of the country’s most sought-after export (the euphoria-inducing khat plant). Faya Dayi is neither a straightforward work of nostalgia nor an issue-oriented doc about a particular drug culture. Rather, she has constructed something dreamlike: a film that uses light, texture, and sound to illuminate the spiritual lives of people whose experiences often become fodder for ripped-from-the-headlines tales of migration. Faya Dayi is now playing daily in our theaters. For tickets and showtimes, go to filmlinc.org/faya.