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Production
2022

Made in Ethiopia

IDA Enterprise Documentary Fund Grantee

  • Xinyan Yu, Director/Producer
  • Max Duncan, Director/Producer
  • Tamara Dawit, Producer
An Ethiopian farmer wearing a yellow headscarf and flowery dress and her daughter in ponytail wearing a blue T-shirt and green skirt stand in dry teff field looking into the distance against a hazy background of a massive industrial zone.

About the Project

Synopsis

 

Three pioneering women navigate the bumpy expansion of the biggest Chinese industrial zone in Ethiopia.

Xinyan Yu, Director/Producer

Xinyan is an award-winning video journalist and filmmaker based in Washington DC. Born and raised in Wuhan, China, Xinyan started her journalism career in 2012 working as a producer for BBC News in Beijing covering the Asia Pacific region. In 2018, she launched the North America video team for Hong Kong’s flagship newspaper South China Morning Post in New York, and later joined the BBC's Washington DC bureau in 2020 as a senior video journalist. Now working as an independent filmmaker, she has directed and produced for the BBC, CNBC, PBS NOVA and Channel New Asia. Xinyan is a Firelight Media Documentary Lab fellow, a Brown Girls Doc Mafia Sustainable Artist fellow and an alumnus of the Yaddo Residency.

Max Duncan, Director/Producer/Cinematographer

Max Duncan is a British filmmaker, journalist and cinematographer. His work has shown on platforms including BBC, Al Jazeera, PBS and the New York Times and been exhibited at galleries including Tate Modern. Now based in Madrid, he previously lived for a decade in China and speaks fluent Mandarin and Spanish. He is an alumnus of Logan and Yaddo fellowships and has received funding from organizations including Pulitzer and Ford Foundation. His half-hour film Down from the Mountains (2018) won a World Press Photo award. Other work has received recognition including Webby and One World Media Awards.

Tamara Dawit, Producer

Tamara Dawit is an Ethiopian-Canadian filmmaker. She is an alumnus of the Berlinale and Durban Talents, EAVE, Apost, Rotterdam Lab and Doha Producers Lab and has been awarded fellowships by Docs in Progress, Logan Nonfiction and TIFF. As a producer, she has overseen documentaries, digital content, formatted television and has recently started producing dramatic films. Her film Finding Sally (CBC/Aljazeera/PBS) premiered in 2020 at Hot Docs and went on to win the Doc Institute Vanguard Award, Adiaha Award at Encounters and the Gordon Park Award at Tallgrass among others.