Synopsis
Dormant for decades, a mothership hovering over post-apocalyptic Ethiopia awakens. Resolved to board the craft, a collector of late 20th century pop memorabilia embarks on a surreal journey to uncover its secrets.
2015 Directed by Miguel Llansó
Dormant for decades, a mothership hovering over post-apocalyptic Ethiopia awakens. Resolved to board the craft, a collector of late 20th century pop memorabilia embarks on a surreal journey to uncover its secrets.
DP's World Tour 2018 - #2 - Ethiopia
We are in the distant post-apocalyptic future where a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurine is revered, having supposed to have once been a talisman worn into battle by an ancient warrior cast, and a Michael Jordan photo is the centre of a shrine devoted to the worship of his iconic image.
There also happens to be a big space ship that has been hibernating while hovering in the sky. A beautiful young woman, Birdy, realises that the spaceship is about to wake up and head back to where it came from when she recieves cryptic nocturnal messages in a bowling alley.
When she tells her tiny partner, Candy, he decides that he…
Moral of the story: There's no reason to pray to Michael Jordan, he is a false god and won't help you keep your boyfriend safe from Santa Claus
This earlier short feature from Miguel Llansó could almost function as a sequel to Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway. Both star the excellent Daniel Tadesse in a leading role and use pop culture and science fiction in an interesting, reclaimed way. This didn't set me on fire quite as much, however. The pop culture notes are hit a bit too hard, and some of the cinematography is the pointlessly hand-held variety that rankles me. It's also much more plodding than Jesus; it feels longer though it's a much shorter film. Still, between the two there is a lot of visible growth and I will be watching with great interest to see what Llansó creates in the future.
Stunning cinematography, jaw-dropping Ethiopian vistas, and excellent performances compliment a gonzo and borderline incoherent narrative in Crumbs, a low-fi sci-fi post-apocalyptic Afrofuturist quest tale-romance about a misshapen man who thinks he’s a marooned Kryptonian living in an abandoned bowling alley with his gorgeous lover who must take to the lonely road armed with plastic weapons and a messenger bag loaded with 20th century pop culture memorabilia to meet Santa Claus in hopes of returning to a rusted spacecraft shaped like a giant forearm hanging in the sky.
Part of 30 Countries 2017. Today: Ethiopia!
As insubstantial and fluffy as its title, but a whole lot of fun with it. Miguel Llansó's film is the sort of thing that - even if you didn't know its distribution history - you would assume had played a few festivals, then went straight on to Vimeo On Demand. Perhaps this is the new underground. If so, it's a fairly fertile one; this wispy, strange, barely feature-length film wasn't built to survive in the market, and given its cheerfully indifferent attitude towards the logos and characters of major entertainment franchises maybe that's for the best.
It has that spirit of détournement, the Situationist term for the wilful corruption of existing copyrights and…
I appreciate this film more than I enjoyed it. The best and worst thing about it, the thing that makes it both interesting and boring, is its commitment to its own reality: the characters are utterly unaware of the absurdity of their attachment to toys and celebrity ephemera from the 21st century (with the possible exception of the scammy pawnshop owner played by Mengistu Berhanu). The whole thing is so straight-faced it *could* actually pass for a transmission beamed directly from the future: the things we see happening onscreen feel as small, boring, and inconsequential as real life, even though the characters take everything they see and do extremely seriously. Actually, that’s also true to life, the way someone may…
A film about the remaining crumbs of a civilisation after a long and devastating war has finally extinguished itself. What little remains of its population has ceased to replenish itself and is now locked in a permanent decline. Lonely survivors roam the wilderness foraging and facing off in a scrap to subsist. We have here the premise for a post-apocalyptic sci-fi survival thriller, except gonzo filmmaker, Miguel Llansó, doesn’t take the idea all that seriously. Instead he serves us up a deadpan comedy romance. In his vision, the cherished crumbs are the plastic artefacts of a long-forgotten age: a Michael Jackson LP; a teenage mutant ninja turtle; or a toy laser gun. A character named Birdy prays before a Michael…
What Happens when society crumbles and we are left many years later with misconceptions about pop icons? Crumbs take a crack at that idea and I’m really not sure if it was a deep take on materialism, pop culture and religion or one bong hit short of bat shit crazy... Either way I enjoyed it’s uniqueness. It’s not as straight up funny as something like zombieland or idiocracy it’s definitely got a darker tone to it.
There's not a single scene from this movie that doesn't stick with you, even though you may be hard pressed to put your finger on precisely why. Two charming lead performances anchor a quiet, steady-paced, but also freewheeling exploration of a post-apocalyptic Ethiopia where the legacies of pop cultural icons and iconography have all been misremembered and embellished upon. TMNT figures are warrior totems (and big props to the movie using Donatello, the BEST tmnt), Michael Jackson was just a humble farmer, and owning a Superman shirt suggests you're likely from another planet.
The film is a quest film, one which slowly reveals the odd future we find ourselves in, and ultimately makes the statement that the "big picture" of…
March Around the World Challenge 2021.
Film 2: Ethiopia
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An entertaining and bizarre post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It seems like the film-makers developed this around some spectacular cinematic settings, like they thought they’d look great in a film so they made one. It worked out really well. The plot isn’t the point, but here goes – some strange things start happening in an ancient ten pin bowling alley and they’re linked to some new activity in the decrepit, disused spaceship that hangs in the sky nearby. There’s a kind of worm-hole phenomenon that links the bowling alley to a skinny Ethiopian Santa Clause who doesn’t have much to do since there are no more children but he keeps asking everyone if…
An Afro-futurist Zardoz. Only with less nappies. And a lot less interest.......
From the director of the similarly odd Jesus Shows You The Way to the Highway, this surreal 68 min future dystopian piece from Ethiopia touches on so many of the same beats as Boorman's sanity bothering semi-classic: war after war has left the planet having virtually given up. A crumbling spaceship in the shape of a giant arm floats in the sky as a relic of the past whilst below, in the now overgrown Ethiopian wilderness, Candy and his lady love are convinced that change is taking place and Candy sets out to find out what and why.......
Its got a real earthy sense to it, the camera…
Part of my African Safari/Nollywood Challenge
If you are anything like me, the sheer idea of an Ethopian science fiction film seems really avant-garde. Yet here is Madrileno writer-director Miguel Llansó making his feature film debut with exactly that -- "a romantic surreal post-apocalyptic adventure in Ethiopia."
The main character Candy (Daniel Tadesse) is a hunchbacked survivor of the War. He has a girlfriend he calls Birdy (Selam Tesfaye), who makes metal sculptures and lives with him next to an abandoned bowling alley. They have a shrine to Michael Jordan on the property, and in the sky above the desolate Ethiopian landscape floats a rusting old space ship, that seems to have no purpose other than as a landmark.
Candy…