AllMovie

Documentarian Jean Lydall returns to the Hamar population of Southern Ethiopia with co-director Kaira Strecker in order to witness firsthand one woman's emotionally raw daily interactions with her family in the 2002 film Duka's Dilemma. A mother of five children and rapidly approaching middle age, Duka (whom has appeared in past films by Lydall) is blind-sided by her husband Sago when he introduces a second wife into the family. While bigamy is legal in this region of the world, it is very rarely practiced -- which fills Duka with many different questions of self doubt. The new and much younger wife, Boro, provides no emotional relief, as Sago's newest wife mostly keeps to herself except while in the midst of a tirade. The resulting film is a study of Duka's attempts to find a sense of identity in an incomprehensibly chaotic household. Filmed in the Hamar language with English subtitles, Duka's Dilemma was consistently seen at a handful of ethnographically-based film festivals throughout 2002 and into 2003.