In Crumbs, Miguel Llansó’s feature film debut, the future does not look like New York or Tokyo, or alternatively, like the postapocalyptic arid wasteland of science fiction films. The projection of the future was shot at Ethiopia’s Dallol Volcano, Wenchi Crater Lake, and the old Dire-Dawa train station, as well as in green forests, an abandoned bowling alley, and an old potash mine. Llansó was born in Madrid and is based in Addis Ababa. The line producer for Crumbs, the Ethiopian director Yohannes Feleke, previously co-directed the short 2010 film Where’s My Dog? with Llansó. The protagonist of Crumbs is played by the Ethiopian theater and film actor Daniel Tadesse, who worked with Llansó and Feleke on the short film Chigger Ale (2013).

The narrative takes place on Earth many years after “the Big War” has diminished the population. When a bowling machine starts to function on its own, the protagonists—who refer to each other as Candy and Birdy (Tadesse and Selam Tesfaye)—imagine that that this is a signal from their long-inoperative spaceship, which hovers above the landscape. Candy believes that he, like his hero Superman, is extraterrestrial. Former Earthly civilizations are both alien and dear to Candy and Birdy, who cling to the extinguished population’s leftover goods. Ninja turtle figurines, plastic swords manufactured by Carrefour (“the last total artist”), and artificial Christmas firs are valued as amulets and so revered that the characters assume they had supernatural powers before the war-induced apocalypse. These items and others are up for trade or sale in a shop whose proprietor (Mengistu Berhanu) acts comically as the film’s historian-anthropologist, dating and interpreting the significance of these holy relics. He tells us that the toy Max Steel sword, “made by Mattelo,” was highly regarded in its heyday and used by Molegon warriors, its design dating to the pre-apocalypse era. He recounts that Michael Jackson’s vinyl album Dangerous is from the third century and inspired Molegon warriors to launch into battle. The shop owner’s narratives parody the manner of experts who piece histories out of the “crumbs” of ancient civilizations, African and otherwise; in the backdrop there are statues of elephants, lions, and camels.

In an April 2015 interview with Oliver Hunt in Gorilla Online (http://gorillafilmonline.com/), Llansó provides some insight into these fictional Molegon warriors: “American society, with Hollywood at the forefront, builds archetypes and characters from overcoming adversity because it’s a dialectical, warrior society.” In its satirical interpretation of the present world’s absurd, grandiose, and violent preoccupations, the film also gathers up the “crumbs” of American cinema: The Godfather, forty years of Superman, and the odd, decontextualized figure of a thief in a Nazi outfit. In the director’s statement on the website of Festival Scope (www.festivalscope.com), Llansó recounts that his inspiration for the film came from a comment of Seifu Yohannes, an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Harar:

In the hope that he will be taken home on the spaceship, Candy embarks on a journey to find Santa Claus (wonderfully acted by Tsegaye Abegaz), who is now living in a dark hole. Taking relics of the old warrior society with him, Candy first seeks the guidance of a clairvoyant witch (Shitay Abreha). Finally, a bureaucratic Santa promises to grant any wish of Candy and Birdy as long as they do not deviate from the prescribed wish list. The fight with Santa is quite funny, and functions as a critique of globally manufactured desire.

Science fiction films imagine the future, but their targets are usually contemporary problems that play themselves out in reversals, dystopias, utopias, and so on. In Crumbs, the interpretations of our present world by people in the future are absurd, and yet they mirror the absurd promises of consumerist cultures that market glory and satisfaction through toys and iconic pop figures. The spaceship in the film is modeled after an icon—a revered holy relic in Llansó’s home town which is said to contain the bones of a saint, even though worshippers cannot, as Llansó says in interview with Rebecca Naughten, identify its context (“Subverting Old Tales from the Future, Part 1,” www.eyeforfilm.co.uk). They worship it anyway. Previous reviewers have compared the world of Crumbs to the spaceship in Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009). The film also references the surrealist science fiction of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009).

Among his influences, the director lists the Spanish-born director Luis Buñuel. At a Q & A session at the 2015 Durban Film Festival, I remarked that Q & As about African films often begin with the question of whether African cinema exists—but why don’t we ask if French cinema exists? Upon reflection, I think that perhaps we should, in fact, question whether French cinema, or any national or continental cinema, exists, or if these conventional rubrics are labyrinthine traps. On the other hand, with the increasing global presence of Nollywood and other cinemas directed by people born or living in Africa, it does seem odd to question whether continental African cinema exists. If the question is about who makes the final call during the cooperative endeavors of creating films, the answers are even murkier. Anjali Prabhu’s eloquent descriptions of films that privilege African settings, people, and stories in Contemporary Cinema of Africa and the Diaspora (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) are helpful. But Crumbs and other science fiction films unsettle things a bit when the setting is an undesignated spot on future Earth and the protagonists are extraterrestrials. What does one make of Birdy, who imagines that she is an alien who someday will meet Paul McCartney on the spaceship? When I posed my question to Llansó about national categories of cinema, he responded that he is not interested in national purity or identity, and followed up by listing what he does care about: globalization, collective action, turning a critical lens on ultra-capitalism. Crumbs, with its playful mockery of cinema scraps, indeed destabilizes conceptions of cinema identity. Perhaps categorizing films under the rubric of a national cinema is a game of illusions, and it is an engaging game, so long as the players are not so caught up in rubrics that the contents are forgotten.