01About this film.
Drone over Amhara is the first short-form treatment in the consortium's documentary slate. It does not attempt to be exhaustive. It places three things side by side — an aerial weapon, a civilian toll, and a documentation effort — and asks the viewer to hold them together for six and a half minutes.
The film opens with a black screen and the sound of a drone in approach. It then proceeds through three documented incidents and the figures known at the time of production: drone strikes recorded since August 2023, the civilians killed, the civilians wounded. The numbers are read aloud as they appear on screen. There is no archive footage of the strikes themselves, and no graphic imagery; the discipline is deliberate.
What the film tries to do, and what it asks the viewer to do, is to refuse the language of "ethnic tensions" and "regional unrest" that has dominated international coverage of the Amhara conflict. The drone is a state weapon. The targets in this film are civilian. The documentation does not come from independent press access — the region has been under telecommunications blackout since August 2023 — but from a verification network of diaspora organisations cross-referencing reports across multiple sources before recording each incident.
02Why this format.
Six minutes is a deliberate choice. A short film travels further than a long one. It can be opened in a parliamentary office, played at the start of a meeting, embedded in a briefing email. The companion Drone Strike Monitor on this site holds the longer record — one hundred and forty-seven incidents documented to date — and the running figures continue to update as verification advances.
The film was produced under tight technical constraints typical of solo diaspora advocacy work: open-source mapping, royalty-free or correctly licensed b-roll, voice-over generated through ElevenLabs, no on-camera interviews. These constraints are part of the editorial argument: the absence of footage from inside the region is not a stylistic choice but a forensic fact. The blackout is what we are documenting.
03How to use it.
The film is published on YouTube under the consortium's channel @AmharaDiplomacy and may be shared, embedded, and translated freely for non-commercial advocacy and educational purposes. For requests to use excerpts in broadcast or institutional contexts, please contact the consortium at [email protected].