ኃያል ኃይል [Hayal Hayl] – Hayal Hayl is originally an Emmy nominated English feature-length documentary film known as A Force More Powerful; this film won several awards, it screened at film festivals worldwide and aired as a special TV series nationally on PBS. For the first time a translation of the film is complete in the Amharic language to the Ethiopia people. The documentary film was written and directed by Steve York about nonviolent resistance movements around the world. Executive producers were Dalton Delan and Jack DuVall. Peter Ackerman was the series editor and principal content advisor. The Amharic language documentary film was produced by Elias Wondimu, a founding director of Ethiopian Institute for Nonviolence Education and Peace Studies.
Hayal Hayl explores the success of six nonviolent movements throughout the world, illustrating the most common misconception about conflict; violence is not the prevailing power. Behind the scenes of making this film was a combination of vigor and tenacity, from the editors, narrator, voice actors, producer, and translator working on this project. After witnessing enough violence themselves, the journalists, artists, scholars and activists participating in the completion of this film believed that Hayal Hayl would be a great way to contribute to a better Ethiopia by showing peaceful engagements as a way to have a voice within Ethiopian politics.
It was translated to Amharic by Mindayie Rasselass and Elias Wondimu; the translation was edited by Dr. Alemayehu Abebe, Frehiwot Samuel, Mesfin Yimam and Kifle Mulat. Tekle Yewhala, from DW (German Radio Amharic Service) narrated the film and voice actors, including Tekele Desta, Alemtsehai Wedajo, Alemayehu Gebre-Hiwot, Girma Degefa, Wendwossen Kebede, Tisgist Nigatu, Abebe Feleke and Konjit Taye participated.
The film explores how popular movements battled entrenched regimes and military forces with unconventional weapons like boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations. Acts of civil resistance helped subvert the operations of government, and direct intervention in the form of sit-ins, and blockades frustrated many rulers’ efforts to suppress people. The story begins in 1907 with a young Mohandas Gandhi, the most influential leader in the history of civil resistance, as he rouses fellow Indians in South Africa to a nonviolent struggle against racial oppression. The series recounts Gandhi’s civil disobedience campaign against the British in India; the sit-ins and boycotts that desegregated downtown Nashville, Tennessee; the nonviolent campaign against apartheid in South Africa; Danish resistance to the Nazis in World War II; the rise of Solidarity in Poland; and the momentous victory for democracy in Chile. Hayal Hayl also introduces several extraordinary, but largely unknown, individuals who drove these great events forward.
