This week, I am very excited to be joined by Zeresenay “Zee” Berhane Mehari who is an award-winning writer/director born and raised in Ethiopia. Zee moved to the U.S. to attend film school and founded Haile - Addis Pictures to produce his first narrative feature film, Difret, which was Executive Produced by Angelina Jolie and won Audience Awards at both the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals. His next feature film, Sweetness in the Belly, based on the international best-selling novel of the same name by Camilla Gibb set during the Ethiopian revolution in the 1970s, was a Canadian-Irish co-production starring Dakota Fanning and Yahya
Abdul-Mateen and had its world premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was distributed by Entertainment One and Gravitas Ventures and was the first feature film helmed by an African director financed by Canada’s public Telefilms fund.

Zee was most recently co-founder and Head of Original Content for Kana Television, the popular free-to-air, private satellite entertainment TV channel in Ethiopia which was recently acquired by Canal Plus. Zee is currently Head of Production and a co-founder of A51 Pictures, an independent film production company based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is currently developing a slate of films for the local and international market. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

In this episode, we talked about the importance of building a community and serving as a bridge between communities. We discussed how vital it is for international students to become part of different communities in college and how those new communities can become family away from family.

Tune-in to laugh, learn and appreciate the international student experience!

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