Voices behind the walls.

01About this film.

Voices Behind the Walls is the fifth short documentary produced under the GADTF banner. Running ten minutes and thirty seconds, in English, it gives a face and a name to eleven people detained in Ethiopia — journalists, doctors, teachers, lawyers and political figures — then places them within a larger whole: at least three hundred prisoners, and the closing of every democratic avenue of recourse.

The film advances a single argument in three moves. First, that these detentions are not judicial accidents but a motive: people are imprisoned for who they are and what they do — to defend, to heal, to teach, to report. Second, that this motive operates at collective scale: at least three hundred prisoners. Finally, it closes the trap — those who might have defended them at the ballot box are behind the same walls.

It is addressed first to institutions — the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the European Parliament, the African Union — while remaining accessible to a broad audience. It relies not on spectacular imagery but on a restrained grammar: the portrait, the verified quotation, the official document, and silence.

02Why this treatment.

Three typographic registers carry meaning throughout the film, so the viewer can read the image without narration. Serif is used for the human — names and quotations. Monospace is used for the system — dates, sources, the metadata of detention. And geometry — rules and frames — stands for the law. This constant rule lets the film state its case visually rather than assert it.

The portraits were adapted to black and white to a common standard, from credited sources; the discipline is deliberate. There is no spectacle here, and no graphic imagery. One recording is used as recorded — the authenticated audio of journalist Genet Asmamaw’s arrest, placed on black before her name appears. The film is narrated by the Clyde voice on ElevenLabs. No individual is credited on screen: the work is carried collectively by GADTF, to protect its authors and their families.

03The legal frame, and its limits.

The film grounds its case in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) — not the Rome Statute, to which Ethiopia is not a party. Article II defines the protected groups: national, ethnic, racial, religious. The argument rests on the notion of intent (dolus specialis) and the “only reasonable inference” standard adopted by the International Court of Justice. It draws on the OSAPG Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, which lists risk factors.

A note of rigour, stated in the film and here. To date, no court and no UN commission of inquiry has qualified the acts against the Amhara as genocide. The International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia (ICHREE) expressly stated, in its 2023 final report, that it was unable to make a determination on extermination or genocide, and recommended further investigation. The film builds an argument from the OSAPG Framework; it does not present that framework as a verdict. It sets out the counter-arguments too — the armed-insurgency context is real, and the multiplicity of actors complicates attribution. The case of Sisay Awgichew adds a distinct and continuing crime under international law: enforced disappearance.

04The eleven.

Each entry gathers the elements verified during the film’s preparation. Where a status could not be reconfirmed against a recent source, it is marked as such rather than overstated.