Lamb

Beginning such as a pastoral story with nice landscapes, mountain view, plain and forest, it's actuall story of Ephraim and his beloved lamb. The movie portrays the innocence of a child, also traditions, hunger, difficult life conditions and a little bit of hope. It makes you feel that Ethiophia, a far away land, is not that distant in fact. It also contains lots of information about Ethiophian culture; their interesting belief mixture for example. As a multi-religious country, they have customs and superstitions similar to those of Muslims, they do prey like Muslims, are blessed with pilgrimage, they as well commomorate Jesus, or have some Buddhists customs. Liked the tiny houses they live in. Among the main characters you see both a grandmother living like Dalai Lama and as well a older sister, being far away from religion, rather secular and believer of positive science, fleeing from her village to live in city. Pretty fun to watch.

It's I believe the first Ethiophian movie to attract the attention of Cannes and The Academy (was Oscar Nominee) when it was released. Really good effort that this movie was able to cross the borders and got known worldwide, which is always nice to see countries display their cultural elements with movies etc. And enlightens our minds a bit making us curious about what we might miss a bit far away from our surroundings.

Exquisitely constructed motion picture.

With some of the same impeccability of simple, but highly layered with meaning, storyline as the book "The Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway, and to some similar degree the movie, "Lamb" carves, from an entirely different part of this planet, a focused seamless motion picture.

If they're making movies like this in Ethiopia, or by Ethiopians, please get us some more!!!

Fitting into the 'slice of life' sub-genre that seems to be so popular in some festivals and for some Western public, "Lamb" doesn't stray far away of the 'movie from little known place that tells you how poor and difficult they have it in their everyday life'. Does that mean that it is a bad movie or that it does a bad job in doing it? No, but it has zero originality and follows too closely the 'unknown-culture- stereotypes' rule-book.

Ephraïm's mother has died, and his father leaves him with some relatives. With him he basically takes the clothes he is wearing and Chuni, his lamb, that was his mother's. Will Ephraïm be able to keep Chuni alive, or will she end up roasted?

"Lamb" is at its best in the moments when it takes the story with a little bit of humor and centers on Ephraïm's efforts to keep the lamb alive. But when it follows the 'explaining-the-culture-to-all-those- white-people-in-front-of-the-screen' moments it just can't keep the level. From the music to all those meetings of people where they talk about the past or the country's culture it reeks too much of being a movie being made with the foreign-rich market in mind.

Too bad, because the lamb's story is one that could have been way more interesting.

A very cute story with beautiful landscape. Not so sad, not so energic but takes you in. A Heidi story in a very different atmosphere...

I found Lamb to be delightful. Be willing to read subtitles, unless you speak Amharic. Enjoy the beautiful scenery of Ethiopia which was once a very dry land. I highly recommend watching Ethiopia Rising also which documents how God blessed the people of Ethiopia to make their agriculture viable and rich after the people kept cutting down trees.