Haile Gerima Sankofa S Movie Is About

Haile Gerima Sankofa S Movie Is About

The movie is about an Ehtiopian man who goes away to college in West Germany then returns to his country that is in the throws of a Marxist regime.

He is at odds with the government whom he has returned to work for.

Teza (2008) is an Ethiopian film about Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopias dictator from 1974 to 1991.

The first part of Sankofa is set on a plantation and my original plan was to shoot in Louisiana, but the minute we got there and they saw a black crew they jacked up the price of everything, he adds.

Times reviewer Kevin Thomas hails the film, which opened May 12 at the United Artists Del Amo in Torrance and the United Artists Cinema in Marina del Rey, as a powerful indictment of slavery that summons up ancient African beliefs.

Hal Hinson of the Washington Post lauds it as a beautiful fable about awakening to the lessons of the past.

More noteworthy, perhaps, than this rousing critical response is that Gerima distributes and promotes his films himself through Mypheduh Films Inc., a distribution company for low-budget, independent films that he and his wife of 12 years, Sirikiana Aina (who is also a filmmaker), established in 1984.

So, we came up with our own system, and this is how it works: When we plan to open the movie in a city, we prepare by making phone calls to the black community and telling people, If you want to see this movie in your town, call 10 people by phone, says Gerima, whose films will soon be available on video.

Sankofa is our first success using this methodology, adds Gerima, who is on a two-year sabbatical from Howard University in Washington where he has taught filmmaking for 19 years.

So, we went to the elders of the African American community in D.C., and they arranged for us to have use of a theater for one week.

The film got a huge response--we played to full houses for 11 weeks.

We then took the film to Boston and Baltimore, and using the revenue from those screenings, took it to 25 more cities.

Krier adds: Bruce Brown distributed The Endless Summer himself, for instance, and Warren Miller handles his ski films, but generally its not a wise thing to attempt because you need a proven success to get in the door of most theaters.

And, its doubly difficult with a film like Sankofa, because theres a dearth of theaters geared toward the black community.

That may soon change, though, because Magic Johnson is planning to open a chain of such theaters.

These difficult odds dont daunt Gerima, who proudly announces that his film has already played in Ghana and London and is slated to open in Jamaica and Brazil later this year.

And of course, many theaters wont rent to us because theres an incestuous relationship between Hollywood, theater owners and video stores.

Weve been evicted from several theaters when Hollywood movies wanted use of the theater.

Why Because if theaters dont take whatever junk comes from the industry pipe, they wont get movies they want in the future.

Born and raised in Ethiopia, the fourth in a family of 10 children, Gerima says his mother was a teacher and his father was a playwright.

When I was growing up, I wanted to work in theater--it never occurred to me I could be a filmmaker because I was raised on Hollywood movies that pacified me to be subservient.

Filmmaking isnt encouraged or supported by the Ethiopian government, who prefer that people merely consume things exported by the U.S.

It was there, he says, I saw the African and Latin American movies that awakened me to myself as a filmmaker--by the time I graduated in 1976, Id completed four films.

Despite having a degree from UCLA and nine films under his belt, Gerima is still an outsider 19 years later.

Many distributors looked at Sankofa, but they all refused to handle it, he says of the film, which was made for 1 million largely raised in Africa and Europe.

Everyone talks about the Jewish Holocaust, but nobody talks about the African American holocaust of slavery.

Weve never dealt with the question of why the world sold black people, and its a subject that still makes people uncomfortable.

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