When I Came to your Door

By 2050, two out of three human beings will live in cities. Addis Ababa, the
capital of Ethiopia, is racing to meet this future. Its population is
growing exorbitantly at an astonishing 4% per year, with projections suggesting
it could double within the next 15 years. Construction is everywhere—
towering cranes, half-finished high-rises, and whole historical neighborhoods
erased to make way for new developments. Yet in this rush to modernize,
there seems to be little time to pause and ask: What is being lost in the
process? The city’s rapid growth promises modernization but comes at a steep
human cost—uprooting low-income communities and dismantling the socioeconomic
networks that sustain them.

When I first visited the informal settlement that you see in the movie, I found
a half-demolished neighborhood. Several families were still living in their
houses, although now they were no longer part of a dense urban fabric;
instead, they were scattered in a barren area full of debris. I was anxious not
to film a typical journalist reportage about the demolitions, but to try and
evoke the complex experiences of the inhabitants.

Among the rubble, we found a love letter of a woman that could not find
anymore her partner after the neighborhood was demolished and its
inhabitants evicted. For me, the letter perfectly captures this feeling: it’s an
account of loss, not just of the physical space, but of the life and loved ones
that once inhabited it. In this film, I tried to reproduce my experience
of reading the letter in a demolished neighborhood, a feeling of being lost,
and the multitude of questions that arrived in my mind around the
notion of development.