When she notices a black-and-white portrait hanging above her grandmother’s fireplace, filmmaker Tamara Dawit learns of an aunt she never knew she had. Is this beautiful young woman perhaps the source of the cryptic pain her elders speak of? Now, four decades after her mysterious aunt Sally’s disappearance, Dawit enlists the help of her four remaining aunts to piece together her life. What she uncovers is a remarkable woman, idealistic and in love, an aristocrat-turned-communist-rebel. When a period of violence and oppression, dubbed the Red Terror, erupts in Ethiopia, Sally is forced to go underground with her then-boyfriend. Her story becomes part of the erasure of a whole generation of young, educated people who paid the price for their political convictions. Interweaving Sally’s story with archival footage from the late ’70s, the film underscores the adage that the personal is political. Aisha Jamal.

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