Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima says his arrival in South Africa last week — when he was met at the airport by African dancers — was a very emotional experience for him. He has come to South Africa to promote his film Sankofa, made a decade ago but receiving its first commercial release in South Africa this week.Gerima realised very early in his career that it would be difficult for him as a black filmmaker to get his films distributed worldwide. “I knew what I was facing and did not want to be managed by economic forces,” he says. “I wanted to be able to present my own material without it being distorted. “For a long time it was very hard for black filmmakers, even in the United States, to distribute their material.” In an attempt to address the unfair system of distribution in the US, Gerima founded the Mypheduh Films Distribution Company in 1982. His company distributes his own films as well as movies by other filmmakers of African descent, from all around the world. Self-production and -distribution are what make Gerima an independent filmmaker. By approaching filmmaking this way, and thus enabling himself to avoid following the Hollywood formula, Gerima believes that he can maintain the integrity of his work.He says bringing Sankofa to South Africa, even post-1994, has been a great struggle because the cinema industry here is controlled by a “white group” that has more of an affinity to European, American and Australian film than to African movies. “How else can I explain it but to say that when it comes to African films, mainstream distributors are biased and racist,” he says. He suggests that one way to overcome such prejudice is to borrow the French idea of creating a privileged space for locally produced films. “The problem is that there is no national, coherent policy on local cinema,” he says. “There needs to be a policy that is open to African cinema.” Born in Gondor, Ethiopia, in 1946, Gerima left for the US in 1967 to study at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago. The time he spent in his native land, however, were the best years of his life.”In Ethiopia, we celebrated our new year in September,” he recalls. “We went to the forest and made torches from splinterwood. We used to go around the village singing praises and the people from the village would come out of their houses and give out gifts.”He also enjoyed holidays spent in the forest, when he and other young people in his town stayed there for several days, fending for themselves. Ethiopia, he says, has great potential, particularly agriculturally, but mismanagement has led to poverty. “The government has always failed to do anything about famine in the country. Ethiopia is a modest place where living could be easy. Life isn’t easy there, but the people have triumphed over colonialism. While you get a lot of rich people in Ethiopia who live comfortably, for ordinary Ethiopians life is harsh but they know what to do to survive.” Gerima is the fourth child of 10. His father was a writer and his mother a teacher. In his youth, Gerima performed in his father’s theatre troupe, which presented original and often historical drama, always submersed in the culture of Ethiopia. He slowly realised, though, that with cinema he could be in greater control as a creator than in the theatre.Gerima received his master’s degree in fine arts from the University of California (Los Angeles) in 1976. Hour Glass, his first short, and his first feature, Child of Resistance, he had already made in 1971 and 1972. He went on to make Bush Mama in 1979, Ashes and Embers in 1982 and Adwa in 1989, among others. Sankofa, released in 1993, examines the danger of not knowing one’s history. It deals with the Atlantic slave trade, using the figure of a contemporary African-American woman who is magically transported back to a slave plantation. A critical problem facing Africans on the continent and people of African descent living in the diaspora, he says, is the issue of recovering the past. “Europeans and Americans continuously forge the future from the past, naming streets and space shuttles after their ancestors. The power of the white world is based on its history,” he says. “People who know their past can comprehend the present and envision the future. It would mean for us to be self-reliant, independent and innovators instead of imitating the Europeans.” Gerima is working on two new movies. Adwa Part II: The Children of Adwa will look at the Italian invasion of Ethiopia during World War II and the gallant determination of Ethiopians to remain free. The Maroons Film Project will investigate the existence of free territories during the time of slavery, run and controlled by people who had escaped. Mike Dearham, the director of the Film Resource Unit, a distributor of African films across Africa, says his organisation has been working to promote positive African images among communities that are usually sidelined. “This [Sankofa] is not a new film. However, it is an important film that will touch the hearts and minds of all who see it. Our approach to launching the film in South Africa is for it to act as a catalyst for dialogue and recognition of our own South African history of slavery and the issues therein,” he says.