Dawit or Every Century Has Its Own Hideous Face is a poetic film that gives voice to the Swedish-Eritrean journalist and writer Dawit Isaak. Since 2001 he has been imprisoned in Eritrea without trial, held alone in a container, while eleven of his colleagues endure similar isolation. His detention has become a symbol of the global struggle for press freedom. The film condenses Isaak’s inner monologue of fear, memory, longing and hope into an intense experience of emptiness, rendering silence palpable. At once an intimate portrait and a meditation on the unspeakable, this film insists on making visible what has been forcibly hidden, confronting the cruelty of censorship and the resilience of the human spirit.
Writer: Wolfgang Martin Roth
Director and editor: Luzie Kurth
Camera: Lars Borges
Performer: André Kendall
Radio play director: Leonhard Koppelmann
Voice actor: Tesfai Berhane
Text consultant: Boris Motzki
Translator: Karen Leeder
Project manager: Andrea Graf
Container footage: Simon Graf
Producer: Wolfgang Martin Roth
