Haile Gerima: Reclaiming Ethiopia on screen

The veteran Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima was a commanding presence at the Berlin International Film Festival (16–22 February), where his latest work, Black Lions, Roman Wolves, was screened. Gerima was also awarded the Berlinale Camera, with the jury noting that the nine-hour film, like the rest of his body of work, bears witness to “histories marked by oppression, resistance, and the unfinished project of decolonization – stories that speak with particular urgency to the present moment.

This recognition in Berlin crowns the career of Ethiopia’s most significant and prolific filmmaker since his graduation from the School of Theater, Film and Television at University of California, Los Angeles in the late 1960s. His filmography includes Harvest: 3000 Years (1974) and Sankofa (1993), a work that addressed the transatlantic slave trade with historical rigor and cultural authenticity. Upon its U.S. release, Sankofa drew remarkable audiences and wide critical acclaim across the United States and Europe, where it received the Grand Prize at the African Film Festival in Italy, as well as in Africa, where it won Best Cinematography at FESPACO in Burkina Faso.

At the height of Sankofa’s success in 1993, Gerima offered a telling response in an interview with Pamela Woolford when asked about the television series Roots. His answer revealed a long-held conviction. While Roots sought to create a sense of harmony between Black and white Americans, Gerima argued that true reconciliation can only emerge from confronting facts rather than cultivating comforting illusions. In his view, the series framed slavery through a lens of false human unity between white plantation owners and enslaved Africans – an idea history does not support. Politics, he insisted, is often the art of lying, and when art becomes political in this way, it deceives. Healing, for Gerima, comes only through truth, because societies grow stronger by facing their realities head-on.

This clarity of vision reflects Gerima’s early experiences. After finishing secondary school in his hometown, he moved to Addis Ababa to study drama, then traveled to Chicago in 1967, enrolling at the Goodman School of Drama. Disillusioned by an atmosphere marked by racism and alienation, he relocated to California in 1969 to study cinema, where he eventually settled. His sensibility was shaped much earlier in Gondar, where he grew up between city and countryside. His father, a church educator and Amharic playwright, had fought in the Ethiopian resistance against Italian occupation before turning to teaching and writing simple plays for church performance. These contradictions, a preacher who was also a guerrilla, faith intertwined with anti-colonial struggle, left a deep imprint on Gerima’s imagination.

As he reflects in an interview with John L.Jackson Jr, Gerima later traced this upbringing into his films Teza (2008), shot entirely in his uncles’ village near historic Gondar, and Harvest: 3000 Years, which incorporated songs written by his father. Moving constantly between rural and urban worlds sharpened his sense of the need for social transformation and a decisive break with imperial despotism. While Harvest offered a sharp critique of Emperor Haile Selassie’s authoritarian rule, Teza examines Mengistu Haile Mariam’s regime through Anberber, an intellectual returning from Germany to a fractured, oppressive Ethiopia. Confronted with a reality that starkly contrasts his Western education and ideals, he is left confused, disillusioned, and unsure whether to surrender to despair or engage in the difficult work of rebuilding – a journey that earned the film the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, among other major awards.

For Gerima, filmmaking has always been a way to assert control over what is told and how it is told, a means of inserting individual freedom into the act of narration. His cinema rests on a keen awareness of film’s power to impose itself as a total form of truth, even to replace lived knowledge and intuition. From this insight emerged his sustained interrogation of cinema’s colonial nature and the necessity of liberating it. That struggle is evident in Adwa: An African Victory and culminates in Black Lions, Roman Wolves, which revisits the fascist Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the people’s resistance.

Gerima often illustrates the idea of cultural colonization through a bitterly ironic personal example: his youthful fascination with John Wayne, whose openly racist views toward Native Americans were reflected both in his films and public life. Wayne’s outrage at Sacheen Littlefeather for refusing the Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando in 1973 exemplified, for Gerima, his deep assimilation into white American culture. The memory takes him back to his childhood job selling tickets at a local cinema in Gondar, which regularly screened American films featuring Wayne, Tarzan, and Western frontier myths.

Radical critique has been a constant in Gerima’s career, extending from imperial power to patriarchal and familial authority, all in pursuit of a new narrative voice belonging to him and his generation. In his study of Third World filmmaking, Roy Armes recounts how Gerima returned to Ethiopia in 1974 with a UCLA crew immediately after Selassie’s fall to shoot Harvest: 3000 Years. Filmed near Gondar and infused with Amharic songs and poems by his father, the work delivered a searing indictment of three millennia of oppression.

As Michel Thomas later noted in Popular Ethiopian Cinema, the ruling Derg regime exploited the film without Gerima’s consent to promote its own agenda against the monarchy. Nevertheless, the maturity of the film, completed when Gerima was just twenty-eight, became his passport to recognition as one of the leading Black filmmakers in the United States. In his landmark study of African cinema, Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike detailed Gerima’s radical commitment to re-presenting Ethiopian and African history through an African visual language, both in spirit and meaning.

While teaching at Howard University, Gerima immersed himself in the writings of Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, Amílcar Cabral, and Che Guevara, and avidly studied Third World cinema from Africa and Latin America. His early films, Hour Glass (1971) and Child of Resistance (1972), already bore a distinctly revolutionary, Marxist inflection.

Deeply committed to his craft, Gerima secured funding for ambitious projects such as the documentary After Winter: Sterling Brown, produced with support from Howard University and dedicated to the African American poet Sterling Brown. Over time, he increasingly took charge of every stage of production, shaping his films with rare autonomy.

Gerima’s return to Berlin drew intense media and critical attention, rivaled only by the political controversies surrounding the Israeli genocide in Palestine during the festival . The focus returned to his stature as one of the world’s most consequential filmmakers, whose work engages complex African realities and extends the legacy of figures like Ousmane Sembène.

At the gate of his ninth decade, Gerima appeared remarkably lucid and youthful in an interview with journalist Laura Della Corte, where he traced the roots of Black Lions, Roman Wolves to his own upbringing. He spoke of a father who wrote plays and fought Italian colonialism, and a mother raised in an Italian Catholic orphanage who remained indebted to colonial missionary work throughout her life. He described the film as a long-delayed collaboration with his father, realized through oral histories, folk songs, archival material, and contemporary footage from the period of occupation. For Gerima, the film is a message of historical awareness to Ethiopians, a reminder of the cost of forgetting a past in which resistance once united them.

This marked Gerima’s third appearance at Berlin, following screenings of Harvest in 1976 and Ashes and Embers in 1983. After three decades of labor, his latest film stands as a powerful continuation of what he began in Adwa: An African Victory and as a culmination of his leadership within the L.A. Rebellion movement of African American filmmakers. The acclaim affirms that the once-angry Ethiopian exile has returned, bearing a hard-won visual legacy that refines ancient Amharic and Ethiopian cultural memory into an advanced, lucid cinematic language – one he believes capable of mending fractures within his society.