‘WAX & GOLD’ Berlinale Review: Ruth Beckermann Tracks Power and Its Echoes in Contemporary Ethiopia

Like most of Ruth Beckermann’s documentaries, WAX & GOLD finds a way to braid the personal and the political—to look for the human story behind (or sometimes in front of) History with a capital H. In the voiceover that opens the film and resurfaces throughout, Beckermann admits that the project began as a kind of creative pretext: an excuse to finally make a long-planned trip to Etiopía, a country that fascinates her and has undergone profound transformations in recent years. Her initial idea was modest enough: a portrait of the hotel where she was staying, the lavish Hilton Addis Ababa, and the people who work there. But her curiosity gradually widens into something more ambitious—an attempt to understand the country’s history, the legacy of Emperor Haile Selassie, and what has unfolded in the fifty years since his overthrow.

Beckermann starts by filming the hotel itself, talking to staff about their daily routines, explaining her project, observing the social events that unfold there—a wedding, a fashion show—while trying to grasp the internal logic of this pristine, luxurious, tightly run enclave coexisting with a far more chaotic city outside its walls. “What time do you have to leave home to get here on time?” she wonders at one point. From the hotel, her inquiry leads back to Selassie, who commissioned and inaugurated it. The so-called Black Emperor—still revered as a messianic figure by Rastafarians—ruled for more than forty years, leaving behind a legacy that blends modernization with murkier authoritarian undertones.

Guided in part by her reading of The Emperor, the famously unsparing book by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, Beckermann begins probing the contradictions and aftershocks of Selassie’s reign, encountering a wide range of interpretations shaped by the country’s present circumstances and by broader African realities. Her investigation unfolds within a nation that already operates on a different temporal logic than the rest of the world: a thirteen-month calendar, a clock that starts its day at what we call 6 a.m., and a current year that is, by Western reckoning, 2018. Add to that a history that includes occupation by Fascist Italy and a series of ongoing cultural shifts—today accelerated by massive Chinese investment reshaping the urban landscape—and the result is a quietly disorienting portrait of a place perpetually negotiating its past and future.

WAX & GOLD—itself a reference to an Ethiopian rhetorical tradition in which words carry both an obvious and a hidden meaning—remains largely confined to the Hilton. Aside from archival footage of Selassie dating back to the 1930s, very little of the outside world is shown. Only toward the end does the camera venture into the city, and even then most glimpses of Addis Ababa are framed from within the hotel’s vantage point, underscoring the film’s overt subjectivity. Beckermann never hides her own positionality—as a white, Western woman—within the story she’s trying to tell.

At times the film edges toward generalization in its attempt to grasp something like the “soul” of the Ethiopian people, but Beckermann sidesteps easy conclusions through perceptive interviews with young locals reflecting on their place within the country’s shifting identity, as well as others describing the personal toll of resurgent ethnic tensions. The most unexpected interviewee may be the one who simultaneously declares support for Donald Trump and advocates for a united Africa. Strange contradictions, it seems, exist everywhere—at any hour of the day, Ethiopian or otherwise.