01About this film.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church — one of the oldest continuously practising Christian traditions in the world — has been the spiritual centre of Amhara civic life for more than sixteen centuries. The Church under attack documents what is happening to that institution today: the killings of priests, the burning of churches, the desecration of liturgical objects, and the silence with which these acts are met internationally.
The film is built on three layers of evidence. First, the official documentation of incidents by the EOTC Permanent Synod and by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. Second, the eyewitness accounts gathered through diaspora networks and partner organisations. Third, the international institutional record — the U.S. State Department's annual Report on International Religious Freedom, the statements of His Holiness Abune Mathias I, the field reporting by Ethiopia Insight and Addis Standard.
It does not reduce a complex history to a single villain. The film situates the attacks within the broader tensions between the canonical Holy Synod and the Oromia dissident synod, between religious affiliation and ethnic belonging, between state forces and non-state armed groups. Where allegations remain judicially unproven — as with claims of state complicity in specific incidents — the film says so. What is not contested is the count: the priests killed, the churches burned, the parishioners displaced.
02What the film asks.
It asks the viewer to consider the targeting of religious institutions as a category of harm distinct from generic political violence. When clergy are killed and places of worship destroyed, what is attacked is not only the building or the person; it is the social fabric that the institution holds together — the rites of birth, marriage, mourning, and remembrance through which a community knows itself.
It also asks the viewer to consider the international dimension. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has communities, monasteries and dioceses across Europe and North America. The crisis at home is felt directly in the diaspora. Letters from European parishes to their bishops, requests for prayers from Amhara congregations in Stockholm, Brussels and Berlin, vigils held in front of consulates — these are not symbolic gestures. They are the form that solidarity takes when families have been waiting weeks for news from villages where the network is down.
03Methodology and limits.
Where exact figures could not be triangulated across multiple sources, the film uses ranges and indicates the source of each estimate. Where individuals are named — victims, witnesses, clergy — their identification was either already public through institutional channels (EOTC, EHRC, US State Department) or established with the consent of family members. No survivor's name is used without consent. No image of a body is shown.
The film is not, and does not claim to be, a comprehensive inventory of religious persecution in Ethiopia. The consortium maintains a continuing investigation on this subject; the next public update is scheduled for 2026.