an open field

On 10 March 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET302, a Boeing 737 MAX, crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board, including Max Thabiso Edkins, the younger brother of filmmaker Teboho Edkins. In the aftermath, Teboho and his father, producer Don Edkins, travel to the crash site in rural Ethiopia, confronting the vast and uncertain language of grief. In East Shewa, they encounter a community whose compassion and ritual mourning stand in stark contrast to the distant, profit-driven machinery of Boeing — the aircraft’s manufacturer implicated in the systems that preceded the tragedy. Through archival material, conversations, and Zoom exchanges with families of victims, the film traces the scars left on the land, within the community, and among the families left behind. Moving through a landscape marked by absence and debris, An Open Field unfolds as a lamentation into grief, accountability, and memory, where mourning becomes an ongoing act of return.