With Ava DuVernay’s nudge, Haile Gerima comes to Netflix
Filmmaker Haile
Gerima is having a long overdue moment, and he’s a little conflicted about it.
The 75-year-old director of “Bush Mama” and “Ashes and Embers” has proudly operated outside of mainstream Hollywood for almost 50 years. Now retired and living in Washington, D.C., where he taught film at Howard University for decades, Gerima has found himself in a spotlight that he’s unaccustomed to with a 4K restoration of his 1993 epic “Sankofa” that’s newly available on Netflix and a retrospective series at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
And neither might have happened were it not for Ava DuVernay. Long a student and champion of Gerima’s groundbreaking films, she spearheaded the restoration of “Sankofa” through her company ARRAY Releasing.
“Mr. Haile Gerima is the reason I was inspired to create my own film distribution company, and he is, very simply, one of my heroes,” DuVernay said. “He disrupted the system long before anyone was willing to take notice and continues to chart his own path.”
Though Gerima has eschewed Hollywood’s overtures through the years, in DuVernay he found a kindred spirit devoted not just to her own career, but to the amplification of Black narratives through independent distribution. “She’s thinking horizontal,” Gerima said. “She’s planning the future cinema of the African American world.”
Gerima told DuVernay she could have any of his films. She chose “Sankofa,” a meditation on the generational trauma of slavery
that takes a modern model on a shoot in Ghana and transports her back in time to a plantation in America. Although the film was celebrated at international festivals at the time, it was not widely released in the U.S. But by then, he was already used to self-distributing his and his peers’ films to universities and cultural centers.
Distribution has been a passion for the Ethiopian-born and -raised Gerima, going back to his time at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the late 1960s and early ’70s when it became clear that if he wanted to get his and his peers’ stories out to the world, he’d have to do it himself.
It was there that he found like-minded peers who were interested in rebelling against the Eurocentric language of cinema and “empowering their own narrative accents.” Prominent filmmakers that emerged out of the LA Rebellion community include Gerima, Charles Burnett, Larry Clark and Julie Dash.
“We felt the many mainstream distribution, even alternative distribution, often could not see what we see in our story,” Gerima said. “The mainstream industry often
works from a very white supremacist paradigm.”
But the business itself was not sustainable.
“We didn’t have the cash flow power because we also made sure 80% went to filmmakers against business logic because that was what we felt we deserve as filmmakers,” he said. “It was not a coherent business, but it was out of rebelliousness that it came about, and it was very anarchistic. We didn’t have the business savvy to continue it. So for Ava to come along and offer to take over the distribution is very important.”
Then came the opportunity from the Academy Museum, which also involved being recognized with the inaugural Vantage Award. DuVernay made the ask and stopped him before he could even answer. “She said to me, ‘I know you’re going to say no,’ ” he laughed.
DuVernay asked for the chance to explain and for him to think about it.
Gerima ultimately agreed. The series includes screenings of Gerima’s shorts and features, like his groundbreaking thesis film about a woman from Watts, “Bush Mama.” It will also highlight works from his peers, mentees and students.