Ameha Molla

Ameha Molla is a creative and marketing professional with experience across production, advertising and brand strategy. Ameha directed six short films while working in marketing at Genentech, a biotechnology company. In this role, Ameha led the creative and production teams for an award-winning brand agency, developing and producing content focused on the stories of patients with cancer. Ameha was responsible for creating story concepts, directing animation and motion graphics teams, and managing on set cast and crew. In February 2020, Ameha joined Apple’s marketing team where he works to create content for one of the world’s most respected brands. Ameha is a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program | Stars Collective grantee and a Fellow of the Black Public Media 360 Incubator Program.

Higher 15

HIGHER 15 is the deeply personal story about the secrets one family was forced to keep as a result of their experiences during Ethiopia’s period of government sponsored genocide in the 1970’s. Director Ameha Molla’s investigation into his family’s past is ignited by his uncle Kiflu, a idealist revolutionary fighting against this brutal regime, who is imprisoned and tortured at the notoriously dangerous Higher 15 prison in Addis Ababa. Kiflu ultimately escapes and is smuggled into the United States. Far from his past in Ethiopia, Kiflu settles into a new life in the suburbs of Denver, working at the US postal service and raising a family – until one day, 33 years after his arrival in America, he comes face to face with the same prison guard who tortured him, and others decades earlier. This deeply buried secret opens up new questions about the family’s experiences in Ethiopia as survivors of war and violence, and the legacy of trauma. As Ameha investigates his family’s past, he also embarks on a hunt to access the prison guard – now in prison himself outside of Denver.