Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In 1984, Band Aid fixed British minds on Ethiopia, then wracked by famine. This week’s anniversary of charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” has prompted debate about its legacy: a timely prelude to absorbing documentary Made in Ethiopia. The subject is a more recent chapter in the country’s history. Behold the gleam of the Eastern Industrial Park, a hub of factories opened by Chinese investors in Dukem, a small farming town south of Addis Ababa.The film opens in 2019 with a slyly literal scene: the marriage of a Chinese groom and local bride. (A stack of cash is handed to her parents.) From here we see China’s Belt and Road Initiative up close, ready to turn Dukem into what one booster calls a new Dubai. For Ethiopian authorities, the attraction is jobs, here where almost half the population is under 18. For Chinese capital, there are obvious advantages to ready land and labour. “Win-win-win,” beams Motto Ma, the compulsively upbeat park director. In her blithe logic, the third winners are the likes of Beti Ashenafi, the young Ethiopian woman in Nike earrings we meet working at a shoe factory.The film unfolds over four years: a long time for the lustre to last. By contrast, co-directors Max Duncan and Xinyan Yu have to squeeze a lot into 91 minutes, even without the wider context of Chinese investment in Africa. The film can be a victim of oversupply: Ma is such an outsize personality that she dominates the story, a metaphor for the lopsided power dynamic between the players. But space is also made for local case studies and nuance too: the now landless farmers whose compensation never quite arrives; the grey zone of older Dukem women with little cause to cherish tradition. And the factory managers? For one at least, Ethiopia feels oddly nostalgic: “Just like China used to be in the 1980s.”★★★★☆In UK cinemas from November 29
