Talent Guide

Lucas Habte

  • Discipline:Director, Producer
  • Program Year:Documentary Lab 2017

Bio

Lucas Habte is an Ethiopian-American filmmaker based in New York City. He began making documentaries as a student at Harvard University, studying at the Sensory Ethnography Lab under Lucien Castaing-Taylor. In 2009, he was awarded a grant from the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies to spend the summer shooting a short documentary in Tokyo, Japan. “Masa, Non-chan and Me” tells the story of a couple of musicians turned social activists fighting housing discrimination and unemployment in Tokyo. In the summer of 2010, Habte moved to Stockholm, Sweden to shoot his next short documentary, “Harena,” which follows an Eritrean teenage girl seeking asylum in Sweden. Upon graduating from Harvard in 2011, Habte was awarded the George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowship to make films with Aboriginal people in the remote communities of the Australian outback. In communities in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, he worked as a media trainer and facilitator, guiding community members through the process of shooting and editing their own films. He also coordinated and managed the competitive section of the 13th Remote Indigenous Media Festival. In 2014, Habte was awarded the Mortimer Hays-Brandeis Traveling Fellowship to shoot a feature-length documentary in Ethiopia. In the fall of 2014, he taught documentary film in the MFA program at Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts. Over the course of 2015 and 2016, he shot his first feature documentary, Shadow of His Wings.

Current Project

Shadow of His Wings

Logline

Hoping to understand his Ethiopian father's history of forced migration, an American filmmaker moves to Addis Ababa and falls in love with a young man who soon must flee homophobic death threats at home to become France's first LGBT refugee from Ethiopia.