Haile Gerima’s Sankofa, with Honey Crawford and Merawi Gerima

Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and retired professor of film at Howard University in Washington DC. Born and raised in Ethiopia, Gerima emigrated to the United States in 1967. Following in the footsteps of his father, a dramatist and playwright, Gerima studied acting in Chicago before entering the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where his exposure to Latin American films inspired him to mine his own cultural legacy. After completing his thesis film, Bush Mama (1975), Gerima received international acclaim with Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), an Ethiopian drama that won the Grand Prize at the Locarno film festival. After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—USA 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic Sankofa (1993). This formally ambitious tale of a plantation slave revolt was ignored by US distributors, but Gerima tapped into African American communities, and booked sold-out screenings in independent theatres around the country. In 1996, Gerima founded the Sankofa Video and Bookstore in Washington DC, a cultural and intellectual space that offers opportunities for self-expression, interaction, discussion, and analysis through community events such as film screenings, book signings, scholar forums, and artist showcases. Gerima continues to distribute and promote his own films, including his last film Teza (2008), which won the Jury Prize and Best Screenplay awards at the Venice Film Festival. He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the US and internationally.

Honey Crawford is an Assistant Professor of English and Dramatic Literature at New York University. She studies Afro-Brazilian vernacular performance as both a scholar and a practitioner, and she positions women-driven spectacles of black consciousness in the twentieth to twenty-first century against prevalent discourse on the black diaspora and performance studies. Her research privileges embodied knowledge and oral traditions while investigating attempts to capture or contain these forms in literature and text-centric works. Her current book project gives attention to theatrical traditions that indulge in an aesthetic of excess, identifying a preoccupation with the transgressive potential held in performances of black feminine power. Where studies of cultural performance of the black diaspora most commonly address the contributions of black women in terms of preservation, her manuscript troubles the temporal and socio-spatial containment that preservation implies. She contemplates how certain legacies refuse containment and in fact promise to exceed outwardly measured constraints through the notion of overwhelming. Honey earned her MFA in Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts and her PhD in Theatre Studies at Cornell University.

Merawi Gerima is an organizer with the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, fighting police terror and with people power. He also makes films to help build that people power. His 2020 film Residue was about Black resistance to gentrification in his hometown, Washington DC. He is currently filming a documentary about the struggle for Community Control of the Police in Chicago and writing a film about the Alabama Chapter of the Communist Party, which was made up of and led by Black sharecroppers, factory workers, housewives, and unemployed people in the middle of the Great Depression, and which ultimately gave birth to the Civil Rights Movement.

Natacha Nsabimana teaches in the anthropology department at the university of Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial critique, musical movements, and the cultural and political worlds of African peoples on the continent and in the diaspora.

The African Film Institute aims to create a home and a place of intimacy with African cinema in New York, through developing gradually and organically a viewing program animated by fellowships; a growing library; an active writers’ room; and an expanding catalog of recorded dialogs. The African Film Institute draws from the visual cultures that view cinema as an evening school: a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination—employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods informed by different uses of time, visual and textual histories, and social struggles and hopes in mutuality between their own locality and the world at large. The African Film Institute is convened by Christian Nyampeta and hosted by e-flux Screening Room.