Since 2002, locally produced Amharic features have come to dominate the screening schedules of cinemas across Ethiopia with, on average, two new releases each week. The majority of films released fall under the yefiker film (love film) or assekiñ yefiker film (humorous love film) genre categories and are consumed by local cinemagoers in Addis Ababa and by members of the diaspora abroad through video hosting sites. These localised genres are central to the strategies of producers and to the commercial viability of the fledgling Amharic film industry centred in Addis Ababa and share broad formal genre conventions with melodramas and romantic comedies the world over, so what is the attraction of local Amharic genre films to Ethiopian audiences? This paper is based on vox pop style interviews with audiences queuing outside cinemas in 2016 (augmented by ongoing research carried out in Addis Ababa since 2012) and will harness this qualitative data to explore the importance of cultural specificity in the creation, sustentation, and mutation of Amharic film genres. Building on work by Rick Altman on film genres and applying a “cultural turn” to the study of film, inspired by cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, this research will use the less well known context of Amharic cinema in order to complicate assumptions of genre in mainstream film and screen media scholarship.