Ethiopian cinema, like the rest of Ethiopia’s film industry, is a relatively new phenomenon. However, Ethiopia’s film industry has faced a number of challenges that have prevented it from reaching its full potential. Ethiopia’s love for live theater has produced only a few notable actors. With the addition of Amharic language in the 2000s, Ethiopian films began to modernize, but copyright infringement and piracy stifled their growth. This decreased in the early 2010s as a result of government involvement and policy imposition. In comparison to foreign premieres, Ethiopian film production remains low-budget and amateurish, despite recent progress. Ethiopian cinema debuted in 1898, three years after the world’s first film premiered on December 25, 1895. The rate of growth has slowed significantly as a result of socioeconomic instability. Since the 1970s, Ethiopia’s film industry has focused on historical and documentary films with cultural, religious, and national roots as a result of government pressure.’ A Frenchman brought the first cinematic artifacts to Ethiopia in 1898, according to Berhanou Abebbé, and sold them to Italian minister Federico Ciccodicola in Annales d’Ethiopia in 2003. Ciccodicola then presented Emperor Menelik II with a gift. The Majesty saw a variety of films over a period of decades prior to the first public film screening (1909–10), according to historians Berhanou and Richard Pankhurst.
