FAQ 33 - Sankofa

Director's Statement:

"The word 'Sankofa' comes from the Akan language. It means 'returning to
your roots, recapturing what you've lost and moving forward.' Because of the
film's subject matter, I felt Sankofa was the most appropriate title for the film.

"In Sankofa, 19th Century slavery is addressed and used as a landscape to
shape and compose a story that deals actually with the contemporary reality of
African slave descendants. Africans and African-Americans of the Diaspora
have never really dealt with the issue of slavery. It has been this nation's most
neglected agenda or subject. And so, I felt it was necessary to dramatize the
subject and make a film that would in the end be very healing for all peoples.
After seeing Sankofa, many people will come to grips with certain aspects of
their own obsessions. They'll realize that they have no real outlet in this society
because this society discourages those people who want to exorcise this
historical incident. The dominant culture in this society wants to maintain the
status quo at the expense of Africans everywhere. We are told to 'march in
place,' while other non-black groups are allowed to heal, meditate, reflect and
grow from their given experiences. By making trivial the whole slavery
incident, they attempt to keep us ignorant of our past. And, if we don't know
and learn from our past, what can we expect of the future?

"The recurring symbol of the bird is an important symbol in Sankofa. From
nearly 20 years of research, I have found that the bird was important to both
slaves and maroons. The duality of the bird, especially the vulture, represented
both life and death. For those who escaped slavery, the vulture acted as a guide
to the hills, away from the dogs, the horses and the overseers. For those who
collapsed or died along the way, the vulture ate or devoured its prey. But then
again, in death there was a certain sense of freedom to those Africans since it
was believed that the vulture would carry your spirit back to your roots, back
home to Mother Africa. Certain birth myths even tell of runaway slave who
'transformed' into birds and flew back to Africa. Whether a physical or spiritual
metamorphosis, both ideas express a fundamental sense of freedom or
returning to Africa.

"Sankofa addresses the continuing problem of those persons in the African
Diaspora who neglect their own history. In dealing with this problem, we must
ask ourselves two questions. How do we as Africans jar our 'collective
memory?' And, is it possible to learn from our collective experiences and move
forward as a people? It is my hope that this film will stimulate the necessary
thought processes needed to engage in meaningful discussion and debate about
the present-day 'slavery' in which we as Africans find ourselves."


About the Director:

Haile Gerima is the fourth child of ten children born to his writer father and
teacher mother. He performed in his father's theatre troupe which presented
original and often historical drama, always submersed in the genuine culture of
Ethiopia. He came to the United States in 1967 to study at Chicago's Goodman
School of Drama. It was then that he slowly realized that "with cinema I could
control many more things than in the theatre." Gerima went on to receive his
M.F.A. from UCLA in 1976, and is currently a tenured professor of film at
Howard University in Washington, D.C. Other films include "Imperfect
journey", "After Winter: Sterling Brown", "Ashes and Ember", "Wilmington 10
- USA 10,000", "Harvest: 3000 Years", "Bush Mama", "Child of Resistance",
and "Hour Glass."


The following is a summary from an article written for the Sacramento Bee
newspaper by Bee Staff Writer Fahizah Alim, 31 March 95.

When Haile came to the U.S. in 1967, "He saw other people who looked like
him. He wondered where they came from. He was 21 years old and had never
heard of the African slave trade. It was not taught in Ethiopian schools. 'I only
learned of American slavery when I got here to this country...I couldn't believe
we had been denied the knowledge of the slave trade in Africa. Even in the
U.S., it was very, very covered up, and you have to dig to go underneath to
find what has taken place. Everybody has collaborated to cover up an African
holocaust.'

"In his film Sankofa, Gerima seeks to show slavery in a way that he says it has
never been portrayed before."


"Gerima, a 48-year-old professor of filmaking at Howard University in
Washington, wrote and directed 'Sankofa' and co-produced it with his wife,
Shirikiana Aina. The film's purpose, he says, is to help Africans and African
Americans understand why and how they came to be who they are.

" 'I made the film [a 9-year project] because I was enraged,' he says. 'I made it
in tribute to that whole brutal event of Africans betrayed by their own people
and by the world.'"


" 'History heals,' Gerima says. 'History is power. Which is why we named the
film 'Sankofa.' Sankofa is a philosophical, mythological bird passed down from
generation to generation from the Akan people of Ghana. The name means to
move forward, you must reclaim the past. In the past, you find the future and
understand the present.'

"...the past, in the form of the African slave trade, has been misunderstood and
misrepresented.

"'I was very unhappy with 'Roots,' ' says Gerima, referring to Alex Haley's saga
that traced a black family from its origins in Africa through slavery and finally
to freedom in America.

" 'I felt it didn't embody the struggle and the resistance spirit of black people in
the sense of fighting back. It only showed their tolerance - their capacity as
victims to tolerate what was perpetrated on them. The spirit of resistance was
very much absent.

" 'By the time of 'Roots,' I had done much research, and I was well aware of
runaway Africans from Louisiana to Jamaica to Surinam. Slaves who had run
to the hills and swamps and caves, and created their own society. Slaves who
returned at night and freed more black people out of bondage. That knowledge
was very important to me.'"

"Characteristically, the making of the film required much of that same spirit of
struggle. Gerima began working on the script while studying at UCLA in the
1970s, but it wasn't until 1983 that he was ready to make the film.

" 'I began to look for money, and it took almost nine years to find money. I
went all over Europe and Africa to find whatever money there was. Our first
shooting was in early 1990. Then we had to stop and go raise more money
(from Africa and European television rights) in order to film in Ghana and
Jamaica. Our efforts to shoot the plantation scenes in Louisiana met with
resistance."

[he mentioned at the Sacramento screening that when the present day
plantation owners saw that it was a black crew wanting to film, they raised the
price so high that is was no longer affordable.]


"Despite winning rave reviews at international film festivals, Gerima says he
was snubbed by American film distributors who he said have described the
movie as 'too black' or 'not commercially viable.'

" 'When we opened at the film festival in Berlin, it was the first time in the 40-
year history of the festival that an in-depth film (on slavery) was included in the
competition,' Gerima says.

" 'However, the next day after the film showed, the American press canceled
their interview with us after seeing the movie. I realized that we were having a
problem with the media power structure. We were desperate for a distribution
deal, but the copy came back with a 'no' '

"The film was shown at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, but
Gerima says it was turned down by U.S. film festivals. A shortage of prints -
there are only 12 now - kept 'Sankofa' out of other international festivals.

"Help came in a fund-raiser screening in Washington, D.C. For $20,000, he
rented a theater and showed the movie. 'Sankofa' ran for 11 weeks. With the
money from the box office, Gerima's Mypheduh Films eventually booked
theaters in 16 other cities, including New York (it's still playing after 33
weeks), Baltimore (14 weeks), London (11 weeks), Chicago (10 weeks),
Atlanta (13 weeks), Houston (five weeks) and now Sacramento, where it will
run through April 6 [or longer depending on the response received - hello?]

Coming your way Bay Area.

"One after another, African American community groups across the country
have taken it upon themselves to raise money to sponsor the film and bring it
to their cities. He calls those groups 'the children of 'Sankofa' without whose
help I would have been silenced totally.'"

After seeing the film at the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta last summer, four
African American women from Sacramento set out to raise more that $10,000
to bring "Sankofa" to Sacramento: local publicist Venita Jacoson; Darolyn
Davis, press secretary to Assembly Speaker Willie Brown; Kimberly Tyler
James, Event Planning; and Alice Scott, a Channel 3 (KCRA) reporter.

" 'Hollywood has disfigured the African race from Day One, from the day they
started filmmaking.... From the silent era until now, Hollywood continues to
disfigure blacks in motion pictures. And then the world has a disfigured
impression of black people.'"

About present day black filmmakers he writes:

" 'Most of them, I don't care for their movies. I don't think they are living up to
the expectations of what is our there in relationship to what needs to be told of
our history. They all just have shooting and killing and sexual exploitation of
each other. In my book, it is another round of black exploitation movies.

" 'My characters are basically human, engaged in something universal.
Something human. Wanting to be free. Wanting to be free is a human notion.
They are not freed by somebody else, and they don't get the idea inserted into
them by Lincoln or a Quaker saying, 'You are a slave and you need to be free.'
They are all like any human being would be in that situation trying to be free.'"

[my personal, and very heart felt thanks to not only the creators of the film, but
also to the brothers and sisters from D.C. and elsewhere who helped get the
spark ignited and keep the ball rolling, and to the four sisters and support folks
from Sacramento whose devoted efforts made it possible for Sacramentans to
see this very important film. THANK YOU!!!]

Kenneth Ritchards {lucumi@ix.netcom.com}
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