Triangle: Going to America - a drama from Ethiopia

Staying with feature dramas that I saw in the recent Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, Triangle:  Going to America - Sost Meazen (directed by Theodros Teshome Kebede) was a moving tribute to not only Ethiopians but really all people who are forced to leave their country and try to make their was to a safe place.

With all the talk these days about immigrants and refugees, it is a very timely film.

Again, this is a drama, not a documentary, but it is solidly based in reality.  The reality is the perilous journey of those who left Ethiopia (but it could be almost any country) trying to get to the United States.  We don't know much about why these people wanted to leave, but we don't need to.  All we need to know is that there are hundreds of thousands, or in fact, millions, of people these days trying to leave the country of their birth because of various hardships and hoping to get to Western Europe or to the United States.

The film started with a group of about 20 people in a truck crossing a dessert.  We quickly learned that they had recently left their country and had paid money to be smuggled into another country.  (We later learned that the goal was the United States.)


As the film developed, the would-be immigrants encounter various serious problems;  serious enough so that by the end, only four actually make it into the United States.  The rest die in the process.

The filmmaker was there to present the film and he said that in fact, those are the statistics:  only about 20% of the many hundreds of thousands who flee actually live to make it to the country where they hope to live.

A sobering thought.

They die from dehydration and starvation.  They die from fierce sand storms in the desserts.  They die from being killed by smugglers.  The drown trying to cross the Mediterranean in flimsy boats.  They die for many reasons, but most of them do die.

In addition, we see that at every stage of the process, there are smugglers with their hands out, asking for thousands of dollars to help them along their journey.  And we see that in many cases, if they don't pay up, they are shot, or left in some inhospitable environment where they will die.

Of course, being a drama, there was a story - the story of the four individuals who, in this fictitious tale, actually made it into the United States.  There was a love angle.  There was strong friendship which helped the four successful ones complete their journey - and the friendship of one of the would-be immigrants willing to be killed to allow the others to achieve their goal.

The film was well acted, and had a real ring of authenticity to it.  It would be hard to leave this movie without feeling that we should be accepting far more, rather than far less, immigrants and refugees.

ADDENDUM:  The director has made a sequel to this movie called Triangle:  the Dream Realized.  Unfortunately, I did not like this sequel as much as the first one which I have reviewed here.

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Next up:  AfroLatinos, an Untold History (directed by Renzo Devia).