At this year’s FESPACO, the winner of Best Picture was “Teza”, by independent filmmaker Haile Gerima. True fans of Black film know that name well. While a student at UCLA, At UCLA he, along with award-winning filmmakers Charles Burnett, Jamaa Fanaka, Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, and Julie Dash made up the “Los Angeles School of black film makers”.
In 1993, he made an undeniable impact still felt today with his film “Sankofa”.
Haile Gerima
Gerima is originally from Ethiopia, and has been a film professor at Howard University in Washington DC since 1975.
Sélomé Gerima receiving the award for her brother
About “Teza”:
Anberber (Aaron Arefe) returns to his village after years spent studying medicine in Germany. Like many such returnees, he plans to use his new knowledge to uplift his people. But faced with a long-running war that continues to produce an abundance of pressing crises, he is unable to act. This is a time in Ethiopian history when the military junta of Haile Mariam Mengistu was hunting down all eligible men for the war effort; in Anberber’s village, young men take to hiding in the hills.
Anberber finds his own escape in memory, flashing back to a childhood before the current war had ravaged his village’s sense of cohesion. Drawing both on ancient oral storytelling and on the dream-narrative style he used in Sankofa, Gerima builds a portrait of Anberber through both his present struggles and interior reminiscences. These recollections are not simply personal; they also encompass the collective memory of Ethiopia, which includes the legacy of Italy’s imperial presence.
Gerima has said that African identity and liberation are the key themes of his films. With Teza, he has found one more sophisticated and potent way to explore them.
Watch this conversation Haile has on the Al Jazeera program “One On One”. He has an interesting perspective on filmmaking and his audience!
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