"Jabina" at the Ethiopian Film Festival: A true story that moved a Maltese audience to anger and to care

When the lights came up at Spazju Kreattiv on the evening of December 10, 2025, the small crowd that had watched Jabina sat in stunned silence. I had come to the screening hoping to learn about a corner of Ethiopia not often seen on screen; instead I left with a knot of anger and sorrow towards a woman who survived what should never have happened.

Tigist Kebede and Regine Nguini at the Ethiopian Film Festival on the 10th December 2025.

Jabina is, as HabeshaView co-founder and operations director Tigist Kebede told me during our interview ahead of the festival, based on a true story. The film portrays a lively young girl, full of promise. That light is stolen when she is abducted and accepts  to marry  the man who violated her when she was 15 years old. She bears three children, submits to a traditional conflict-resolution system led by elders (The Oroma Gadaa system ), and  heartbreakingly chooses to give up the only man she ever loved in order to secure a father for her children.

What made the evening charged was the combination of the film’s storytelling and the weight of the reality behind it. I felt anger at the choices imposed by necessity : how could anyone willingly accept to marry their rapist?  

Cinema as cultural witness

Tigist Kebede, who founded HabeshaView with other members of the Ethiopian diaspora to address a glaring gap, explained why a film like Jabina matters on the festival circuit. HabeshaView began as a simple streaming service but has grown into a multifunctional platform and distributor. Its mission is twofold: to preserve and promote Ethiopian storytelling for the diaspora and to push those stories into international festivals and conversations.

“At the moment,” Tigist said, the platform offers “Ethiopian films as well as international and African content,” and increasingly works on distribution and co-production so films can be made with higher budgets and broader reach. For Jabina, that reach meant a Maltese audience getting a direct glimpse of social norms, family dynamics, and legal traditions that might otherwise be reduced to headlines.

Tigist Kebede posing with Christine X and two memebres of the Ethiopian community in Malta at Spazju Kreattiv during the Ethiopian Film Festival 2025

Tradition, power, and the human cost

One of the most difficult aspects of Jabina is how it shows the interplay between tradition and power. The elders’ intervention is presented as a community coming together, as well as a mechanism that often forces survivors to choose the lesser of terrible options. In Tigist’s words, the film shows “the elders getting together to find a solution,” and the painful reality that sometimes the “solution” could be grounded in superstition, and accepted by the survivor,  for the sake of family stability, or for fear of the power of the curse. 

I thought about the loneliness of those choices. The girl who becomes a mother and who gives up the one love she had for what she believes is best for her children shows the painful choices she has to make. The film lets the audience experience the uncertainty she faces

The festival as a living room for the diaspora

What made Jabina’s screening especially powerful was the presence of Malta’s Ethiopian community. Tigist told us there were around 160 Ethiopians in Malta last year and many attended the festival. For members of the diaspora, seeing films in Amharic (with English subtitles) is entertainment, but also reclamation of landscapes, accents, jokes, and sorrows that streaming clips cannot fully convey.

Tigist argued — and the evening proved her right — that physical festivals remain vital. “You cannot replace that,” she said of face-to-face encounters: “hand shaking, taking photographs.” Online platforms can increase access, but festivals create community, dialogue, and the visceral impact of shared viewing.

Tigist Kebede posing with two members of the Ethiopian community in Malta at Spazju Kreattiv during the Ethiopian Film Festival 2025

Beyond the screen

Jabina opens questions about how societies balance tradition with individual rights, how diasporas carry memory and resilience, and how cinema can be both mirror and catalyst.

If you missed Jabina on December 10, the festival continues  with a lighter diaspora comedy, Qalat, on December 11.

For anyone curious about Ethiopia beyond headlines or eager to understand the complicated choices some people are forced to make, Jabina was an unmissable evening that left me angry, but also grateful that such stories are finding audiences beyond their borders.