The Ethiopian filmmaker is one of the most remarkable figures associated with the movement L.A. Rebellion, and the director behind the acclaimed Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), Ashes and Embers (1982) and Sankofa (1993). Gerima belonged, therefore, to a generation of filmmakers from the 60s to the 80s linked to UCLA who created a revolutionary Black Cinema diverging from Hollywood conventional representations and stereotypical scripts, and who stayed attentive to the real african-american lived experiences and culture.
Born in 1946, Gerima lives and works in the USA - where he emigrated to in 1967. Following his father’s dramatist and playwright steps, he started studying Acting in Chicago before enrolling in the Theatre, Film and Television School of UCLA. There, the Latin-American documentary films set in wartime and testifying for people’s impressive survival, made quite an impression on the filmmaker growth, both in political and artistic terms.
During his time at UCLA, Gerima directed the short films Hourglass (1971) and Child of Resistance (1972) - both socio-politically motivated, in their reflection of the fight for social justice and emancipation for the african-american community. Bush Mama (1976), focused on urban poverty, is his first feature film; and Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), winner of two awards at the Locarno International Film Festival, was his first long production set in the African territory. With a narrative and documentary quality, Harvest: 3000 Years sets a critique of modern Ethiopia and, more broadly, of neocolonial Africa as complacent with a reconfigured explorative power of its territory and poorer population. Ashes & Embers (1982) - also an allegory to the problematics of power in a post-colonialist Ethiopian society - preceded the epic Sankofa (1993), a film conveying the return to an ancestral african past while portraying the oppression and revolt from a group of plantation slaves. Ignored by American distributors, the film was nonetheless applauded internationally with awards at the Berlinale and the Rotterdam and Fribourg Film Festivals.
Gerima then founded the Sankofa Film and Bookstore in 1996, as an intellectual space for expanded expression and discussion, and has been a film teacher at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is still distributing his own films, including the recent Teza (2008) awarded at the Venice Biennale, and advocating for young independent filmmaking.
