New documentary Finding Sally is an investigation into the life of the director's aunt, Selamawit (Sally) Dawit, seen here, who mysteriously disappeared.Courtesy of GAT
In the stodgy Ottawa of the late 1960s, the Ethiopian diplomat’s daughters were something of a sensation. With their big hair and vivacious personalities, they were occasionally mistaken for the Motown pop group The Supremes.
On the surface, they seemed like a typical diplomatic family. The sisters went to high school and university in Ottawa, while Pierre Trudeau danced with their mother at an embassy soirée. But in 1973, for one of the sisters, everything changed. Her life, interwoven with revolution in Ethiopia itself, became far more extraordinary than anything their diplomat friends could have imagined.
For the Ethiopian-Canadian filmmaker Tamara Mariam Dawit, the documentary is also a story of family secrets.Courtesy of GAT
Her story – told in the new documentary, Finding Sally – began in the days of an emperor, Haile Selassie. After the interlude in Ottawa, it accelerated through years of street uprisings, dictatorship, massacres, terrorist plots and attempted assassinations, until finally ending in death in a remote mountain village.
For the Ethiopian-Canadian filmmaker Tamara Mariam Dawit, it was also a story of family secrets. Her aunt, Selamawit (Sally) Dawit, had been one of the diplomat’s daughters in Ottawa, but the family rarely mentioned her. Until the filmmaker spotted a photo of Sally above the fireplace in her grandmother’s house, she knew little about her long-lost aunt.
Finding Sally, which has its premiere Thursday on CBC as part of the Hot Docs at Home series, is the saga of how Dawit discovered her aunt’s story, why it was shrouded in silence and what it tells us about the collective amnesia of an African country that is only now beginning to wrestle with the truths of its own history.
A family portrait. An Ethiopian aristocrat-turned-communist-rebel Sally disappeared after the revolution that lead to the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie.Courtesy of GAT
It’s also a reminder of the incredible richness of immigrant stories in Canada. Ethiopians are among the biggest African immigrant groups in Canada, yet their stories have seldom been deemed worthy of cinematic portrait in this country. Nor have Canadians learned much about the turbulent political history that spurred thousands of refugees and migrants to flee from Ethiopia and journey to Canada.
“When I first pitched this to the CBC, one of the first things I said to the commissioning editor was, ‘Ethiopians are the second-largest black African population in Canada, and you as a national broadcaster have never produced any content, for or by Ethiopians, to explain to the wider Canadian audience why there are so many Ethiopians here in Canada,’” Dawit says.
“The only information we ever get is the images of the famine. It paints one picture of the country, and it’s important to have a wider slice of the story.”
Sally travelled to Ethiopia and became caught up in the student protests, seen here, against Emperor Haile Selassie.Courtesy of GAT
But while the film is about Ethiopia’s modern history, it is ultimately a family story – the kind of story that shifts and evolves as families reconsider their lives from new angles.
In making her film, Dawit took inspiration from other Canadian documentaries about the tangled memories of odd and exotic families: Sarah Polley’s acclaimed 2012 film, Stories We Tell, along with Shawney Cohen’s The Manor, a 2013 documentary about a Jewish family running a small-town strip club in Guelph.
The woman at the heart of Finding Sally is equally intriguing, although her life was more of an epic tale, on a much broader canvas.
After completing a sociology degree at Carleton University in 1973, Selamawit Dawit travelled to Ethiopia and soon became caught up in the student protests against Emperor Haile Selassie. She joined a revolutionary Communist movement, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), married one of its young leaders and became a women’s rights activist.
It was an act of family rebellion as well as political revolt. Her father had been raised as a godson of the long-ruling Emperor. As a diplomat, he remained so close to the Emperor that they were connected by a special phone in his bedroom.
Sally's sisters are seen journeying to the remote village in the northern mountains where she reportedly died. They never saw her after she disappeared underground with her Marxist comrades.Courtesy of GAT
When the Emperor was finally toppled from power by street protests and a military mutiny in 1974, he was replaced by the Derg, a military regime that soon imposed a dictatorship and massacred thousands of people in the EPRP and other groups.
In those years of terror, Sally disappeared underground with her Marxist comrades. She soon became involved in violent revolutionary plots – and even an attempt to assassinate the leader of the Derg. Her sisters never saw her again.
Her niece Tamara, who now runs a production company in Addis Ababa, spent years uncovering the full story of her aunt, journeying to the remote village in the northern mountains where the story ends.
For decades, the Red Terror of massacres in the 1970s was too traumatic for many Ethiopians to remember. Their family stories were closely held, and they mourned in silence.
When the dictatorship was ousted in 1991, the new government was often repressive, and the fear remained. Only in 2018 did a new Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, apologize for the death and suffering of so many people.
Dawit sees her film as an indictment of silence – in families and in societies. Even now, she says, when young Ethiopians protest against the abuses of today’s government, their elders still hesitate to talk about their own losses from the revolutions of the past.
Finding Sally premieres April 30 at 8 p.m. ET on CBC, 9 p.m. on the Documentary Channel, and will be available on CBC Gem afterward as part of the Hot Docs at Home series
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