Don Edkins lost his son Max in the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash that killed 157 people. Together with his surviving son Teboho, he produced a short documentary titled An Open Field, which focuses not on the disaster itself but on the process of mourning. The film is set in the rural Orthodox Christian Tewahedo community living near the crash site in Ejerie, about 28 miles from Addis Ababa airport.
Why the film was made
Teboho Edkins initially resisted the idea. "It's not a sexy subject. At first, I really didn't want to do it at all," he said. The concept originated with Don, who after one therapy session was advised to use his creative talent to aid grieving. "And so I started making a film," Don recalled.
The documentary is an exploration of grief through the lens of a community with a structured mourning process. "They have a very structured process of mourning," Don said. "We felt that was very interesting because it helped us in our own mourning to understand what mourning meant to them."
The mourning process
In the village near Ejerie, 40 days of mourning follow a death, after which anniversaries are marked for seven years. Only then does healing begin. The film captures a funeral years after the crash, showing men singing, beating kebero drums, and rattling tsenatsel shakers. One man reads the Bible while singing; dozens pour into the streets holding pictures of the deceased, crying and wailing.
The crash created a crater 10 metres deep, 40 metres long, and 28 metres wide, with wreckage found 300 metres away. Don described the site as "a living graveyard." A security guard assigned to protect the site spent weeks collecting bone fragments. Teboho noted, "That brings about talking about death and us understanding that he's a guardian of our bones and our loved ones."
Justice and Boeing
The Ethiopian Airlines crash was the second disaster involving a Boeing 737 Max jet, following Lion Air flight JT610 in October 2018 that killed 189 people. Both were linked to the MCAS automated flight-control system. Families have sought justice from Boeing, but the company has settled cases and paid penalties without a public reckoning.
In the film, Don interviews Dr Getachew Tessema, father of the pilot Yared Getachew. Tessema accused Boeing of trying to shift blame onto the pilots, saying, "They insisted to push [blame] to the captains, because they can't defend themselves. They are dead." Teboho added that western media responses had a racist element: "It's like: 'African airline, African pilots, obviously they'll f*** up.'"
A Boeing spokesperson said: "We will never forget the lives lost on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610 and their loved ones. Their memory and the hard lessons we learned from these accidents drive us every day to uphold our responsibility to all who depend on the safety and quality of our products."
Personal yet universal
Teboho described the film as "a documentation of an encounter and two different kinds of grieving." He aimed to make it minimal and not overly dramatic. "It was not meant to be a personal psychological project. It was meant to be a film that speaks to people who don't know us either," he said.
The documentary uses raw footage, interviews, photographs, news clips, and text, with sound playing a key role. "We use lots of field recordings, we create layers that are not necessarily of the moment when you see the picture – to create sound that is expressive and shows what I'm feeling, rather than what I'm actually listening to," Teboho explained.
The Edkins family occupies multiple roles: grieving relatives, documentarians, journalists, and campaigners. Teboho said, "It's a story that we're uniquely positioned to tell. We didn't watch the whole thing happen. We just felt it."
