Haile Gerima : Filmmaker and Educator
Haile Gerima was born and raised in 1946 in Gondar, Ethiopia. He grew up under the influence of the tales and stories of his mother, a teacher, and his grandmother as well as his father, a writer, playwright and former resistance fighter against the Italian colonialists.
After a brief period at the Creative Art Center of Haile Selassie University, Gerima emigrated to the United States in 1967 to attend the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago before transferring to the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in Los Angeles where he would study film.
During his studies, he becomes part of a group of Black, Native American, Chicano, Asian and other international students that questioned and rebelled against the prevailing Western traditions of filmmaking. At UCLA, Gerima directed the two short films Hour Glass (1971) and Child of Resistance (1972) – followed by his Master of Fine Arts film, Bush Mama (1976), as well as Harvest 3,000 Years (1976), which earned him his first international recognition with the Grand Prize at the Locarno film festival.
In the summer of 1975, Gerima moved to Washington, D.C. to teach film at Howard University. After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982), which did not find a distributor in the United States, and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1979) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), which is about the legendary Black writer from Washington D.C.
Gerima produced his popular epic, Sankofa (1993), for which he was awarded with the Best Cinematography Award of the FESPACO Pan-African Film Festival in Burkina Faso. The internationally acclaimed and cinematographically ambitious tale of a plantation slave revolt was shunned by U.S. distributors.
Through mobilization of activist communities and relentless cultural groundwork, Gerima tapped into Black communities and booked sold-out screenings in countless theaters around the country. After Adwa. An African Victory (1999), Gerima directed Teza (2008), which won the Jury and Best Screenplay awards at the Venice Film Festival, the Golden Tanit and four other awards in the categories of music, screenplay, cinematography and acting at Carthage Film Festival as well as the Golden Stallion of Yennenga at FESPACO.
Together with his wife and filmmaker Shirikiana Aina, Gerima created the distribution company Mypheduh Films and the production company Negodgwad Productions, both dedicated to independent Black cinema. In 1996, Gerima founded Sankofa Video, Books & Café in Washington, DC., a cultural and intellectual space that offers opportunities for collective self- expression, interaction, discussion and analysis through community events such as film screenings, book signings, scholar forums and artist showcases. In 2003, the Independence Film Festival of Washington D.C. awarded Gerima with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Gerima continues to distribute and promote his own films. He is Professor Emeritus at Howard University, lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally. In 2021, he received the Vantage Award of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.