Fiercely independent Ethiopian film-maker Haile Gerima spoke to ANDREW WORSDALE about the travails of making films the African way
VISIONARY film-maker Haile Gerima is a handsome, rotund man with a silver, close- shaved beard, a baseball cap hiding hair- loss and features held in place by some pretty hip spectacles. The Ethiopian-born and Washington-based film-maker’s work is in the poetic African genre, alongside luminaries like Djibril Diop Mambety; yet unlike many of his continental peers he doesn’t rely on French finance to produce his romantic visions from Africa.
As a result all of his films – being the meditative vehicles they are – have been plagued by financing problems and have taken many years to complete. Gerima compulsively sips rooibos tea (a popular beverage in Ethiopia) and gives his take on the French influence: “France has been shrewd. The French have subsumed the early works of Sembene (African cinema’s founding father) and Med Hondo in order to make Africa `exotic’.”
Gerima is in the country as a guest of the Newtown Film and Television School, a major force in developing previously undernourished local talent which, to its credit, has invited several independent creative talents as guest lecturers. These have included Mambety, Mira Nair, Gaston Kabore and Costa Gavras.
In a rhythmic mix of Ethiopian and American accents, Gerima considers the fate of emerging South African film-makers: “There’s obviously a great amount of talent in this country. I just hope the young South African film-makers don’t get caught up in Hollywood. They need to find their own melody and fight for it too. You don’t need to make exploitative or racist-based films, instead produce a sensitive cinema.”
Asked by the publication Index on Censorship about the future of African cinema, Gerima responded, “South Africa is crucial to the rest of Africa because it has the technology and the infrastructure. But this could be a two-edged sword: it will be a platform for the USA and the rest of the West. If South Africans merely exploit this by pumping out Hollywood movies and videotapes all the way from the Cape to North Africa that could be very frightening. But if South Africans develop their own cinema and create an easy platform for film-makers all over Africa, this will be to the advantage of all of us. South Africa is a cross-roads for African cinema.”
He hasn’t seen any local movies but given the kind of cinema he produces Gerima would probably detest our glossy Hollywood- influenced output (Cry the Beloved Country, Oh, Shucks, it’s Schuster!).
Gerima has spent a significant period of his life in America, graduating from Los Angeles’s UCLA film school and going on to a film professorship at Howard University in Washington. As a result, his films are distinctly poetic investigations into the creation of an African identity while cast into the diaspora.
Despite his academic duties he has managed to make several innovative films:
His 1976 production Bush Mama, tells the story of a defiant and independent woman who lives on welfare in the ghetto of Watts, Los Angeles and resists welfare’s interference.
Harvest: 3 000 Years is the true-life story of a peasant family’s struggle to survive under virtual feudal conditions on the farm of a wealthy landowner.
Ashes and Embers is the tale of a Vietnam vet who returns to America, only to discover the similarities between African-Americans and his country’s avowed foe – the Vietnamese people.
All his films share a clear line of politicised debate coupled with personalised, poetic narratives and imagery. His latest work, Sankofa (an Akan word meaning to return to the past in order to go forward) is the tale of a contemporary supermodel who is possessed by the spirits lingering in a coastal castle in Ghana.
She travels back in time and becomes a house servant on a sugar plantation. If this was a typical Hollywood picture she would probably have to right a wrong or inspire social change before returning to the present (as in the TV series Quantum Leap). However, this is a fiercely independent production and she has no mission other than survival, understanding the system of slavery and her nation’s history.
Gerima struggled for nine long years to raise the million dollars needed to shoot Sankofa, a modest amount as it’s a historical epic. Yet he got no joy from Hollywood, failed to garner support from America’s most prolific funder of “difficult” movies, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), nor was the National Endowment of the Arts interested.
As he remarked in Index on Censorship, “Many African-Americans and Chicanos can’t make the movies they want to because they don’t live up to the expectations of white producers. That’s why you see so many black independent film-makers playing with Hollywood and making bizarre shoot `em up and kill movies.”
Eventually Sankofa was jointly financed by British and German television groups and interests from Ghana and Burkina Faso – the first time two African countries have collaborated on a film about slavery. But once the film was completed Gerima struggled to find distributors. “No one wanted to touch it, the so-called independents said it was too black,” he reflects. In desperation he rented a cinema in Washington with his own money and the film played for 11 weeks and subsequently travelled the country to an enthusiastic response from mainly African- American audiences.
Sankofa went on to become a huge independent hit – winning awards in Italy, Berlin and California – making enough money in America to enable Gerima to produce two documentaries; Adua 1896 (about the Italian campaign in Ethiopia) and Anchor Bye ‘n Bye (about the continual historical attachment Africans in the diaspora have for the continent).
Despite its overwhelming success in America Sankofa’s only African screening was in Ghana. “We haven’t touched the African reality,” Gerima sadly adds. “It’s nothing new. I’ve been trying to get my movies shown in Ethiopia for years with no result. The bureaucracy of distribution there is impossible.
“It’s a sad thing to be born in a Third World country with so much to say and so few resources.” That strikes a particularly resonant chord among the students at Newtown’s Film and Television School.
Gerima’s films can be ordered directly from his own company Mypheduh Films, PO Box 10035 Washington DC 20018-0035