Harvest: 3,000 Years

A poor peasant family in Ethiopia toils for a cruel landowner under a feudal labour system; the young daughter, who resents the limits placed on her as a girl, drowns while trying to pull a cow out of a flooding river. At harvest time a man the villagers consider mad confronts the landowner and beats him to death, then hangs himself, and officials carry the harvest away without a word on the villagers' share. Shot with non-actors on black-and-white 16mm after the fall of Haile Selassie, the film won the Silver Leopard at Locarno in 1976.