Dead Weight (2009)

With the death of her beloved mother, Hewan, a poster child for the successful, over-achieving immigrant, thought she was going to be able to finally bury her memories of Ethiopia. But the sudden appearance of her estranged father at the wake starts unsticking her perfect quilt of a life. The last time Hewan had seen her father was right before he fled the military junta which had toppled the Haile Selassie regime. He was a marked man- a bone fide aristocrat, a member of the Emperor's cabinet, a well regarded diplomat. Men like Ambassador Merid didn't flee Ethiopia. But 1974 dawned a new and bloody era in Ethiopia, and caught up in what would be known as the Red Terror days was a 15-year-old Hewan, her two brothers and her mother. Now, over thirty years later, Hewan sits face-to-face with a father who never came back for the family. Ambassador Merid, still a regal and powerful personality, arrives at his daughter's house, perhaps to also put Ethiopia and his nightmares to rest. Things start to further corrode when, at a chance encounter at an art gallery, Hewn runs into the man who had tortured her during the Red Terror. Ben, a successful consultant and a single father, has moved to Los Angeles. He is intrigued by Hewan, and she doesn't fend off his flirtations. How does a woman resurrect her past demons in order to slay them? How does a man determined to keep his thorny past hidden deal with a present that was quickly unraveling? And how does a father, a scion of wealth, status and breeding, come to terms with being painstakingly humbled by the unsaid words of a daughter he had abandoned?