A Fire Within
**Seen for the 2021 Atlanta Film Festival.
Doing recreations of events in a documentary can be a dicey proposition. If you go too far with them, they will be laughably out-of-place and add nothing to the film as a whole. I think the gold standard remains Errol Morris’s “The Thin Blue Line,” which recreated the crime at the center of that film with such subtlety and power that it only increases the cumulative impact of the film. In “A Fire Within,” Christopher Chambers uses two sets of recreations to hammer home the anxiety and trauma his subjects dealt with, and the result is remarkably powerful.
The film begins in 1989, and Edge is an Ethiopian refugee living in Atlanta who has begun working at a Hotel downtown. One day, she is talking to one of her fellow employees, and there is something familiar about his voice. She later puts it together- the man is Kelbessa, who tortured her and others during the Red Terror in 1970s Ethiopia. She tells two friends, Hirut and Elizabeth, who don’t believe her at first, but after seeing him in person, the memories flood back. Unable to live with the knowledge that he is living free, Edge contacts the Center for Constitutional Rights, and a legal journey begins to have Kelbessa held accountable in civil federal court. That means opening up old wounds, and facing someone who changed all of their lives forever.
Chambers gives us historical context for the political situation in 1970s Ethiopia, and what the Red Terror- enacted after a military takeover and the execution of political enemies- but the journey Edge, Hirut and Elizabeth go through is the heart of the film. We hear them recollect their stories in modern interviews, while Chambers uses the recreations to not only put us in the courtroom with them when the case finally goes in front of a judge in 1993, but also to visualize what these women went through. The desired effect in both uses are different- the torture scenes are for us to get a clearer, indelible picture of the pain these women went through without exploiting the scars they still carry, while the courtroom scenes reflect their strength of coming forward, and facing their tormentor. A surprising decision threatens the latter, however, if it has the desired effect, but these women are strong, and determined to see justice served. Their voices humanize these events for us; that they’re still standing is a tribute to their resilience. That comes completely from their ability to sit and discuss what they went through in front of Chambers’s camera.
