The Man Who Made Memory: A Personal Tribute to Haile Gerima

By Endex, the Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

I have been a journalist for many years. I have written obituaries for kings and eulogies for activists, reported on wars and chronicled elections. But there are moments in a writing life when the subject demands not a report, but a confession a piece written not from the head alone, but from the marrow of one’s own story. This is such a moment. And the man who demands it is Haile Gerima.

 

Let me begin where it truly begins for me: 1993. A small cinema tucked away off Portobello Road in West London. It is a blustery autumn evening, and I have been dragged there, there is no more honest word, by a university friend whose enthusiasm for Ethiopian cinema far exceeded my own. She told me that a professor and filmmaker named Haile Gerima had made a film about slavery. She told me he had mentored extraordinary talent. She told me he was one of ours. I confess I was not immediately convinced. But I went.

What happened inside that cinema changed something in me permanently.

 

A Revelation Off Portobello Road

The film was Sankofa. Named for the Ghanaian Akan word meaning ‘to go back, look for, and gain wisdom, power and hope’, it follows a Black American fashion model who undergoes a harrowing spiritual journey to a plantation in the antebellum American South. In lesser hands, this could have been melodrama, or worse, exploitation. In Gerima’s hands, it was something I had never encountered before in a cinema and have rarely encountered since: truth delivered with the full force of art.

I felt it from the opening frames. The visual language was unlike anything Hollywood had offered us raw yet luminous, poetic yet unflinching, expressionist in the way that only a filmmaker who has absorbed both African storytelling traditions and the radical energy of the American counter-cinema movement could achieve. Sankofa was formally ambitious to a degree that seemed almost reckless, and yet every choice was earned. When the drums sounded and the spirits of the enslaved rose from the floors of Cape Coast Castle, I was not watching a film. I was bearing witness.

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.

When he stepped onto the stage for the Q&A, the room shifted. Here was my fellow countryman, standing with grace and quiet dignity and I felt, for the first time in a long while, the particular pride of shared origin.

He spoke about the sacrifices behind the work. He spoke with a candour that was electrifying, and at moments heartbreaking the years of fundraising, the rejections, the loneliness of making films that the industry did not want, the determination to carry stories that others feared to touch. I remember sitting very still. It was the kind of stillness that falls over you when you are in the presence of something authentic. He was not performing humility. He simply had the ease of a man who had decided, long ago, what he was for and had never wavered.

I left that cinema altered. I had gone in knowing almost nothing about Haile Gerima. I came out knowing that I would follow his work for the rest of my life.

 

Born in Gondar, Shaped by the World

To understand Haile Gerima is to understand where he came from. He was born on 4 March 1946 in Gondar a city of ancient castles and highland winds in northern Ethiopia, a place that carries centuries of royal history in its very stones. His father was a playwright and dramatist who toured the Ethiopian countryside staging local theatre; his mother was a teacher. The house he grew up in was saturated with storytelling, with the Amharic oral tradition, with the fierce independence of a people who had never been colonised, not fully, not finally and who knew it.

In 1967, at twenty-one, he left for the United States first to study drama at the Goodman School in Chicago, then to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he would discover the cinema that would become his weapon and his calling. At UCLA, he fell in with an extraordinary cohort of Black, Chicano, Asian, and international students who collectively refused the grammar of Hollywood. They formed what would later be known as the L.A. Rebellion, a movement that sought to build an entirely alternative, politically conscious, aesthetically radical Black American cinema. Haile Gerima is one of its most towering figures.

His early films announced him immediately. Harvest: 3,000 Years, made in Ethiopia in 1975, won the Grand Prize at the Locarno Film Festival. Bush Mama, made the following year, was a searing portrait of Black poverty and resistance in Los Angeles. Ashes and Embers followed in 1982, winning awards in Lisbon and earning recognition at the Berlinale. Each film was stamping his name deeper into the conscience of world cinema, even as mainstream Hollywood looked the other way.

 

A Question at SOAS, and an Answer That Stayed With Me

Some years after that first encounter in Notting Hill, I saw him again, this time at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, at the premiere of his documentary Adwa. The film concerned the extraordinary Battle of Adwa in 1896, when Ethiopian forces under Emperor Menelik II defeated the Italian colonial army in one of the most significant military victories in African history: the first time an African nation had routed a European colonial power on the battlefield.

I was curious about the funding. The film, I had learned, had received Italian backing. This troubled me in a way I could not entirely articulate. Italy was the defeated party. Italy was, in the deepest sense, the villain of the story. Why had Gerima accepted their money? Was there not a risk, however subtle, of the narrative being shaped by the very power whose humiliation it documented?

I put the question to him after the screening. His answer was simple, disarming, and utterly characteristic of the man: no one else had been willing to finance it. The Ethiopian government had not come forward. The international co-production community had not come forward. The Italians had. And so he had taken their money, looked them calmly in the eye, and made a film that placed Ethiopia’s resistance and pride at its absolute centre, a film grounded in historical truth and the testimonies of those who had fought, refusing to soften a single frame of what Italy’s colonialism had meant.

He had taken the coloniser’s resources and turned them into a monument to the colonised. This is a particular kind of genius political, artistic, moral.

I walked away from SOAS that evening with a deeper understanding of what it means to operate without institutional support, without the safety net of a nation-state willing to fund its own history. Gerima had not waited. He had never waited. He had found whatever resource was available and bent it to the service of truth. This, I came to understand, was the defining characteristic of his entire career.

 

Teza, and the Courage to Look Inward

When Teza arrived in 2008, his first feature in nearly a decade, it felt like a homecoming of the most complicated kind. The film is a profoundly personal and politically courageous work, following an Ethiopian intellectual who returns home from Germany during the brutal era of the Derg military junta. It is a film about the particular tragedy of the educated African who goes abroad seeking knowledge and returns to find his country transformed into a place of terror, where the very idealism that drove him away has been weaponised into something monstrous.

Haile Gerima did not flinch from the darkness of the Mengistu era, the Red Terror, the disappearances, the way in which revolutionary rhetoric had curdled into authoritarian nightmare. Nor did he retreat into sentimentality. Teza is a film of extraordinary compassion and equally extraordinary rigour. It won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Screenplay Award at the Venice Film Festival. It won the Golden Tanit and four additional awards at the Carthage Film Festival. It won the Golden Stallion of Yennenga at FESPACO. The world’s cinema community recognised what Ethiopian audiences had perhaps always known: that here was a filmmaker who loved his country enough to tell it the truth.

When he brought Teza to London, I was in the audience again, older now, a consultant and chief editor rather than a young journalist, but feeling once more that particular stillness of being in the presence of authentic work. Gerima had done it again. He had refused to make the comfortable film, the redemptive arc that tidies everything up. He had insisted on the full weight of history, and the audience bore it willingly, because he had earned our trust.

 

Thirty Years in the Making: Black Lions – Roman Wolves

And now, in February 2026, as the lights of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival fall upon him, Haile Gerima has completed perhaps the most monumental work of his extraordinary life.

Black Lions – Roman Wolves is nearly nine hours long. It took thirty years to make. It is a reckoning, vast, meticulous, and unsparing with Italy’s brutal colonial campaign against Ethiopia. Drawing on archival footage that Italian filmmakers, at Mussolini’s direction, meticulously recorded during the 1935 invasion, and combining it with contemporary interviews with eyewitnesses and descendants of those who fought, Gerima has built an epic from the coloniser’s own images, turning them against the ideology that created them.

The paradox was not lost on him. At the Q&A following the Berlin premiere, he spoke of it with characteristic directness: his people had not filmed. The Italians had. And so he took those images racist in their framing, propagandistic in their intent, and asked a radical question: how can I use the image depicted by the coloniser against itself? The answer, running to nine hours and screened in two parts across consecutive days at the Delphi Filmpalast, is his most sustained and audacious work to date.

He told the packed Berlin audience that he had begun the project in 1996, fed up with what he called the ‘fake history’ of Italy’s Ethiopian campaign the selective memory, the glossing over of mustard gas attacks, of massacres, of the systematic attempt to humiliate and subjugate a proud nation. He had been raised, as he put it, under the miseducation of the British education system that followed the Italian war, and he had never forgotten what that meant: to have the story of your own people’s suffering filtered through the lens of those who had caused it.

He had spent thirty years correcting that record. Thirty years giving the barefoot soldiers of Ethiopia their voices back.

 

The Berlinale Camera: A Recognition Long Overdue

On 17 February 2026, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the grand hall of the Delphi Filmpalast, the Berlin International Film Festival presented Haile Gerima with the Berlinale Camera, the festival’s honorary award, given since 1986 to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to cinema and with whom the Berlinale feels a special and enduring connection.

The award itself is a remarkable object: crafted by Düsseldorf goldsmith Georg Hornemann, it is assembled from 128 individual components into the form of a real film camera. It is, in its way, a perfect symbol for what Gerima has built, piece by piece, film by film, year by year, into a body of work that has transformed not merely African cinema, but the global conversation about colonialism, memory, and resistance.

Berlinale Director Tricia Tuttle said it with admirable precision when she announced the award: Gerima’s works bear witness to histories marked by oppression, resistance, and the unfinished work of decolonisation stories that speak with urgent force to the world today. It is an honour to present the Berlinale Camera to a filmmaker who has transformed the way so many understand the world.

For those of us who have followed him for decades who sat in a small London cinema in 1993 and felt something shift inside us this recognition carries a particular weight. Not because we needed the Berlinale’s validation to understand Gerima’s greatness. We never did. But because there is something profoundly moving about watching the world finally, formally, say: yes. We see him. We always should have.

 

Teacher, Builder, Cultural Keeper

No account of Haile Gerima is complete without speaking of the life he has built beyond the camera. Since 1975, for more than half a century, he has taught film at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he holds the title of Professor Emeritus. He has mentored hundreds of young filmmakers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the African-American diaspora, insisting to each of them that their stories matter, that their voices are necessary, that the industry’s indifference is not a verdict but an invitation to build something better.

With his wife and fellow filmmaker Shirikiana Aina Gerima, he founded Mypheduh Films, a distribution company dedicated to ensuring that independent African cinema reaches audiences without surrendering to the gatekeepers of the mainstream. In 1996, they opened Sankofa Video, Books & Café in Washington a cultural institution offering film screenings, book signings, community discussions, and a physical space for the kind of intellectual life that sustains a people’s sense of themselves. That café has been sustained, in no small part, by the revenue from Gerima’s own films, self-distributed with the same grassroots determination he has brought to every project.

He is not merely a filmmaker. He is an ecosystem of resistance. He built the conditions in which the next generation of African storytellers could imagine themselves.

 

What He Carried And What He Gave Back

There is a word in the Ghanaian Akan language sankofa that Gerima made the title of his most celebrated film. It means, at its most literal, to go back and retrieve. It is often symbolised by a bird flying forwards whilst its head looks back. It speaks of the necessity of understanding where you have come from in order to know where you are going.

Haile Gerima has lived this word. He left Gondar as a young man, carrying the landscape and the stories of his highland childhood into the lecture halls of Chicago and the film schools of Los Angeles. He carried the memory of his father’s plays into the grammar of his own cinema. He carried the defeats and the dignities of Ethiopian history, the Italian occupation, the Derg’s terror, the Battle of Adwa, into works that ensured that those events would not be forgotten, not be distorted, not be claimed by anyone but those who lived them.

And he gave it all back. Every film is a gift to Ethiopia, to Africa, to the African diaspora, to anyone who has ever had their history stolen and replaced with someone else’s version. Every student he trained is a continuation of this act of giving.

Watching him receive the Berlinale Camera alongside his old comrade Charles Burnett, the two old warriors of the L.A. Rebellion, grey now, unhurried, utterly undiminished felt less like a prize ceremony and more like a moment of profound historical reckoning. The industry that once ignored them was now placing golden cameras in their hands. I suspect Gerima found some quiet satisfaction in that. I suspect he also found it, in some deep part of himself, beside the point. The work was always the point.

Haile Gerima has never simply made films.

He has made memory.

He has made resistance.

He has made truth visible.

And for those of us who first met him in a darkened cinema in London, who felt something change inside us as his images unfolded and his voice filled the room — he has made something rarer still.

He has made pride. Deep, resonant, enduring pride.

 

May his lens never rest.

 

Endex, Chief Editor, Ethiopian Tribune

London, 20 February 2026

The Ethiopian Tribune celebrates Ethiopian excellence in arts, culture, politics, and society.