Please contact Daniel at gudukassa (at) gmail.com for access to showreel
After daringly crossing the Canadian border looking for a better life, a Kurdish artist (Harem) grapples with what truly makes a place home.
Drawing parallels between the precarious nature of the creative process and making a life in a new country, this film uses Harem’s art to re imagine his experiences, fears, and hopes of one day living a good life in Canada with his wife and mother who are still back in Iraq.
Commissioned by MENA Film Festival and Movies Move Us
Shot, directed and edited by Daniel Negatu
Structured as a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, ተስፋዬ / Hope re-imagines the extraordinary life of an Ethiopian castaway refugee, rescued from the sea in Madagascar and now living in Toronto.
Fespaco Film Festival (2019),
Reelworld Film Festival (2019),
Addis Ababa International Film Festival (2020)
York University graduate thesis prize
Distributed in North America by Cinema Politica and VIVO Media Arts.
Directed, shot and edited by Daniel Negatu
An Ethiopian shoulder dance.
Directed and edited by Daniel Negatu
A community based film about how one couple built a sustainable, organic and ecologically diverse farm in a world bent on industrial agriculture and mono-cropping.
The politics of food, land use and resource management are the most pressing issues the world faces today, and it’s all happening right in our back yards.
Directed by Rebecca Garrett
Edit and additional camera by Daniel Negatu
To watch entire film go to
https://www.rebeccagarrett.ca/meeting-place-organic-film
https://www.meetingplaceorganicfarm.ca/
A multi-channel video project on using an Ethiopian book called Oromay to engage in local discussions about the central conflict between creative expression and authority.
The author of the book (Bealu Girma) disappeared shortly after publishing the book during the military regime in Ethiopia because it was critical of the government and had caricatured versions of then government officials as characters in the book.
The video installation shows an actor (Bereket) reenacting scenes from the book combined with interviews with Bereket as himself and in character.
This multi-channel video installation was part of a bigger exhibition of photographs and descriptions of Girma’s work exploring how the issues dealt with in his book (Oromay) are still relevant in contemporary Ethiopian society.
In collaboration with Eric Gottesman. https://www.ericgottesman.net/
Another uncomfortable elevator ride.
Directed and edited by Daniel Negatu
Coming Soon…
Ethiopian forces under the leadership of Emperor Menelik II
defeated the Italian invading force on Sunday 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa.
This decisive victory thwarted Italy’s campaign to expand its colonial empire in the Horn of Africa. It also elevated Ethiopia as a beacon of black pride and panafricanism.
Ethiopians and black people around the world have marked the anniversary of this momentous victory ever since.
Recorded during the 126th Adwa celebration at Central Park, Burnaby, British Columbia.
This was really an exercise in figuring out the role AI can play in my creative practice and frankly, I am a bit blown away and concerned by the results.
These frames were shot during one evening by English Bay in Vancouver, Canada with the overarching theme of migration/movement in mind. The frames and underlying concepts were later described in Chat GPT which spat out a version of the included VO script.
AI Voiceover generated from Eleven Labs.
