In rural Ethiopia the staff of a health centre are fighting maternal mortality. They tirelessly appeal to women to give birth in the clinic. But reservations are strong, and so are the practical obstacles. How are heavily pregnant women supposed to arrive in time when the ambulance comes hours later or not at all? Against medical advice, Hulu Ager decides to give birth at home, assisted by a traditional midwife.

With palpable familiarity, the film crew captures moments of intimate communion between Hulu Ager, the midwives and other women. On the margins of the central conflict, the many challenges they face in a patriarchal society emerge. The debates are most lively under the hood dryer at the hairdresser’s: She doesn’t enjoy sex because of her circumcision, the medical professional Welela reports. “Sometimes you have to prepare yourself for sex,” another customer advises. Sometimes it helps to get drunk. But the perky hairdresser is sure: Bad sex is grounds for divorce. The women share their desires and woes with each other, experience solidarity and gather courage for small and great acts of departure and resistance. Men are relegated to the role of extras, if at all.

Socio-geographic explorations on the periphery of Addis Ababa, run through by a variety of borders and rifts – between agrarian and urban spatial practices, between economic and linguistic floes, between perspective and dilemma. A polyphonic audiovisual narrative of people who are forced to experience the impetuous urbanisation of African societies the hard way, recorded as a case study that expands into a complex allegory.

Addis Ababa (Finfinnee in the language of the rural Oromo people) is a rapidly growing East African metropolis. “Rift Finfinnee” evolves from the concrete observation of main and side effects of urbanisation in four extremely different settlements, located within sight of each other on the eastern outskirts of the Ethiopian capital, to an expansive composition about the dynamics of an urban turbo modernisation. The Great Rift Valley currently still (!) constitutes a both natural and symbolic barrier to limit the further tentacle-like expansion of the megacity into agricultural territory – across this and other rifts. This interim report on the situation at the rifts probes the field of tension created by unstable pasts, unreliable futures and a contested present.