Digitalization of Hirut, the First Ethiopian Fiction Film and Addis Ababa International Film Festival

In film festivals Purpose of digitalized works especially screening works are at the basic of changes resulting from the development of digital technology and information society. Film screening mediums radically changed the way of traditional film making processes such as producing, distributing, and archiving. Digitization is the second most relevant change in cinema history. It replaces conventional 35 mm film and projectors with computer workstations and high resolution electronic video projectors. It has introduced the Computer Generated Imaginary (CGI). Digital media affects all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulating, storage, and distribution, but the computer media revolution also affects all types of media text, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions (Manovich, 2002, p. 43). Ethiopian film producers slowly started to digitalize DVD formats of production. Who does this Digitalization of Hirut (2020) do? And what is the fat of AAIFF 2020? This paper seeks to address these issues. Hirut was released on DVD in March 1964 and digitalized in 2021 in the screening of the first Addis Ababa film festival. The pioneer film and theatre directors, Addis Ababa city cinema hall administers, prominent film producers, and young film scholars participate in the Digitalization of Hirut (2020). It is there most recent contribution in digitalizing process in the history of the first Ethiopian film in Addis film festival. The author of this article used primary and secondary data. In addition to this, he directly participated in the digitalization process and presented his ongoing Ph.D. desertion project which is directly related to film digitalization. For film festivals in the AAIFF film festivals so he used participation method to investigate the data. Finally, he found that digitalization of films and government owned film festivals in Ethiopia give green light in the archiving and development of film industry in Ethiopia.