The Man Who Made Memory: A Personal Tribute to Haile Gerima
The respect I felt rising in me during those two hours was immense, the kind of respect one cannot manufacture or perform. It came from recognising craftsmanship of the highest order in service of a moral imperative that could not be ignored. Here was a man who had spent twenty years researching the trans-Atlantic slave trade, who had been rejected by every major American distributor, and who had taken his film city by city, cinema by cinema, to Black communities across the United States until the world had no choice but to take notice. The film that no one would distribute was eventually ranked by Harvard Film Studies professors as one of the most essential films in the history of world cinema between 1980 and 2000. But that evening in Notting Hill, I knew none of this. I only knew what I felt.