Sephora Woldu

This beautiful film about the immigrant experience is a San Francisco film about Eritrea. Sephora Woldu plays "Sephora" who, like the director, is an architecture student but also a filmmaker. She is pitching to her traditional mother a film she wants to make about a man who fled their home country and ended up in San Francisco. As a recently arrived immigrant, he is terribly homesick for his native Eritrea, but will not admit it due to unease towards speaking ill of the country; and more consciously in hesitance of admitting hard truths about his culture and himself. "It’s colorful and visually whimsical in a way that can only be described as if the Wizard of Oz went to Africa," said Woldu.

Set in the early 1990’s of San Jose and Asmara, a family prepares to leave the US for Eritrea during the formative years of their country’s newly won independence. Everyone is an alien in navigating a free Eritrea— the diaspora moving back home, the citizens who never left, and the aliens from outer space who picked a strange and beautiful time to make contact.