Alganesh: Hope On the Horizon (2021)

The conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which formally escalated into full-scale war between 1998 and 2000 before simmering on in various forms for years afterwards, left enormous numbers of civilians displaced and children particularly vulnerable. It is against that backdrop that Dr. Alganesh Fessaha, an Eritrean-Italian humanitarian and activist, has spent a considerable portion of her life working to secure better futures for young people caught in the middle of a crisis that rarely commands the attention it deserves in the Western press. Alganesh: Hope On the Horizon (2021) documents that work, following Fessaha alongside figures including Music Ghebreghiorghis and Ezekiel Channe as the film attempts to capture something of the human cost of long-term displacement on the Horn of Africa.

The film was directed by Marianna Beltrami and Lia Beltrami, running to a modest sixty minutes, and comes to us as an Eritrean and Ethiopian co-production. The short runtime is common enough in documentary filmmaking when the subject is a single individual's mission rather than a broad historical survey, and at an hour it sits somewhere between a television documentary and a more substantial theatrical feature. For viewers who have not already done some background reading on the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, the film represents one of relatively few screen works to engage with the region at all. Among the handful of other films from Eritrea that have made any kind of international circulation, this blog has previously covered Cigarette, which gives at least a small sense of how infrequently Eritrean cinema reaches wider audiences. In terms of documentary filmmaking more broadly, the challenge facing any short doc of this kind is how to balance personal testimony with enough wider context to give a newcomer their bearings, a balance that other documentaries reviewed here, like Nom Tèw, have had to manage in their own ways.

Fessaha herself is the clear centre of the film, and her real-world work, which has included efforts to free hostages from people-traffickers operating in the Sinai, has earned her recognition from humanitarian organisations across Europe. Whether a sixty-minute documentary is sufficient to do that work justice is a reasonable question to ask going in. The Beltrami directors keep the camera close to their subject and to the children around her, favouring observation over narration, which is a legitimate aesthetic choice, though one that carries obvious risks around pacing and information. Those risks, as you will read below, are not entirely avoided.

A-Z World Movie Tour Eritrea It's worth doing a little reading on the conflict in the area as they don't really cover it well. The subject matter is important. It's heartbreaking. It's definitely something that needs more awareness. However... this documentary is super basic. It's just long monologues from a Dr involved here and long silent scenes watching kids eat or a woman cooking. Bit of a shame really.

That frustration is one I share, and it is a particular kind of disappointment, the sort you feel precisely because the subject matter genuinely matters. Dr. Fessaha's story deserves a documentary that meets it halfway, one that provides the historical grounding a first-time viewer needs while also letting the human moments breathe. As it stands, the film functions better as a prompt to go and read around the topic than as a self-contained piece of filmmaking. If you are after documentaries that manage to carry both emotional weight and a bit of structural rigour, you might get more from something like Next Goal Wins or, for something more recent, Megdan: Between Water and Fire. This one, for me, is worth an hour of your time mainly for what it might inspire you to go and learn afterwards. The film itself is only half the homework.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2021  | Watched: 2025-06-13

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Alganesh: Hope On the Horizon (2021) on YouTube

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