‘The film I didn’t want to make.’ - Two documentaries on the Boeing crash in Ethiopia (2019)

‘The film I didn’t want to make.’

Those are the opening words of documentary maker Teboho Edkins in his documentary An Open Field (2025) about the crash of Boeing 737 Max. This took place in Ethiopia on March 10, 2019, and all 157 people onboard died in that crash, including his brother.  

You should see this 38-minute documentary, winner of the IDFA award of Best Short Documentary 2025. Watch it in combination with Netflix’ Downfall: The Case Against Boeing (2022) to get a fuller picture. I had first watched the Netflix documentary (91 % Rotten Tomatoes score) before seeing An Open Field during IDFA on Tour in the cinema.  

The Case Against Boeing shows you what happened with the airplane – where it technically went wrong. It also looks into the Boeing company culture, once a proud and safer company where employees felt listened to, changing into a company that is focused on shareholders and profit. And the documentary is with the family of the killed passengers and pilots fighting it in court – who next to the hurt also have to deal with the blame shifting onto the pilots.

An Open Field shows you what it does to one family, and more specifically the documentary maker being at the place where his brother died, standing quietly in the field where it happened, and listening to the stories of the villagers. The Ethiopian village next to which the crash happened has been changed by this event – literally the open field, but also in the way they make space for grief about this happening, their own and that of the passengers and staff onboard. They clean up the bones and debris, have photos on the wall of the deceased. And they include the family members in their rituals of grief.  

See here the trailer of the An Open Field.

The documentary makers – what is their agenda?

An IDFA festival organizer said once that is always important to know who the director is - why they made that documentary. This might seem like an automatic question we pose to ourselves, but looking at my critical thinking courses and even when watching documentaries myself, this is a question we need to ask ourselves explicitly.  

The director of Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is Rory Kennedy, and she is indeed part of the famous Kennedy clan, the youngest child of the assassinated US Senator Robert Kennedy. She has a political agenda, and a personal family history of flight crashes, and in interviews you can hear more about why she wanted to make this documentary. This sheds more light on why she made the documentary this way.

Teboho Edkins did not want to make this documentary, but did feel the need to. Less digging into why seems required as Edkins shows himself in front of the camera – he lost his brother, he is grieving, and part of the process is visiting the place where his brother died. But Edkins as director chooses what to show and he films a clip that is playing on his laptop where you see his father, from South Africa, talking to the father of the pilot, from Ethiopia – they talk about how hard it is to fight the Boeing lawyers, and how hard it seems to give a voice to the family members. Edkins’ father says that together, all voices combined, they can be heard – the pilot’s father says perhaps they can. Their background and experience seems to make a difference in whether you feel you have the space to make your voice heard.

One main event – a big crash. Two documentary makers that have a different background, message, style and perspective taking. Even though they are both not favourable towards the company Boeing, they share a different story. Watch them both, and if you like - let me know what you noticed.