Crumbs

Centuries after the apocalypse, the malformed Candy (Daniel Tadesse) loves beautiful young Birdy (Selam Tesfaye) and she loves him too. But Candy is troubled: he thinks the strange spaceship hanging in the sky is starting to operate again, and in the bowling alley where he and Birdy live, some of the ball-returning mechanisms have also started working, all by themselves. Candy hopes that the local witch can help him make sense of these signs, but she tells him that he must travel to the far-away city to find Santa Claus, who is the only one who can tell him what to do. So Candy starts off on his strange quest, while Birdy stays home and daydreams that her unborn child has been fathered by a more perfect specimen than Candy....

This is a very strange film, in which a photo of Michael Jordan on the b-ball court is a shrine, a Michael Jackson vinyl LP is venerated and cheap plastic toys are precious items to be bartered for enough money to perhaps earn passage on the spaceship to, well, wherever the ship might be going. I can't say that I understood it really at all, but it was an interesting film nonetheless. We in the West don't often see Ethiopian landscapes, which is more varied than I would have thought, and the characters are all engaging in their own, strange ways. It's a very short film at 68 minutes, and worth your time to check out, if only for its oddity.