Screening & conversation_ Sankofa 

with Haile Gerima

YEAR:
1993
FORMAT:
35mm, color
COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN:
USA/Ghana/Burkina Faso/Germany

Powerful, moving and highly acclaimed, director Haile Gerima’s Sankofa is a masterpiece of cinema that has had a transformative impact on audiences since its release in 1993.  This empowering film tells a story of slavery and of the African Diaspora from the perspective of the enslaved, challenging the romanticizing of slavery prevalent in American culture.

Sankofa was developed from 20 years of research into the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the experiences of African slaves in the New World.  The film represents complex characters and empowering moments of resilience that assert humanity in the face of subjugation.  Unlike Hollywood’s depiction of slavery, Gerima presents the often suppressed history of slave resistance and rebellion and represents the enslaved as agents of their own liberation [...]

The film’s narrative structure follows the concept of “Sankofa,” an Akan word that signifies the recuperation of one’s past in order to comprehend the present and find one’s future. 

—Words by Allyson Nadia Field (https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/films/sankofa)