This film invites you to be part of the struggles and aspirations of some 112 million Ethiopians, as it follows Dr. Shohista Saidkasimova, Consultant Ophthalmologist, arriving from the UK and arriving in a country riven by unrest and poverty. It follows her as she struggles, with the help of the locals, to deal with and perform much needed surgical operations on hundreds of patients suffering from chronic eye conditions.

Filmed over three days at the beginning of 2018, in the middle of Ethiopia’s national elections, as anti-government protests were taking place on the streets following the resignation of Prime Minister Desalegn. Abiy Ahmed, an ethnic Oromo, was about to win over his challengers to become an aspirational Prime Minister for Ethiopia.

As a filmmaker I’m very fortunate to be invited to travel with medical teams around the world for different projects, but it was my first trip to Ethiopia, the second most populous country in Africa. With just a small JVC camera hidden deep in my luggage, and with no other equipment allowed in the county, I had less than a week to follow this medical project in one of the oldest countries in the world.