'Sankofa' Director Back With Film of Africa Battle
10:13 a.m. Nov 24, 1999 Eastern

By Mary Gabriel

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With the 1994 picture ``Sankofa,'' Ethiopian
director Haile Gerima became something of a legend in the independent film
world.

His haunting story of an African American woman's time travel back to the
days of slave trading was rejected by Hollywood, which said it did not know
how to market it. But Gerima did. He simply let the movie speak for itself.

He and his wife, Shirikiana Aina, rented a theater in Washington to screen
the film and raise some money. Word of mouth about the powerful picture
was so great that it remained at that location for 11 weeks, then traveled to
32 other U.S. cities, was shown in London for more than four months and
was screened throughout Europe and Africa.

By independent film standards ``Sankofa,'' which cost about $1 million to
make, was a blockbuster. Now Gerima is back, hoping his latest picture,
``Adwa: An African Victory,'' will speak as loudly and to as many audiences.

``Adwa'' debuted in the United States on Nov. 20 at the Lincoln Theater in
Washington. Using oral history, song, poetry -- in the Amharic language with
subtitles -- and period prints to enhance footage shot in Ethiopia, Gerima
creates a mellifluous chant recounting an 1896 Ethiopian victory over Italian
troops that inspired the Pan-African and nationalist movements, and later the
American civil rights movement.

His method is not unlike that of an Ethiopian warrior who, returning from
battle, sings the report of his fight to the emperor. ``He can't talk about his
deeds per se. He raps it,'' Gerima said of the warrior tradition. ``In a poetic
form all his own, he composed his deeds and chanted that in front of a king
when the war was finally over.''

IN 'ADWA' GERIMA AGAIN RECLAIMS PAST

In ``Sankofa,'' an Akan word that means ``we must go back and reclaim the
past so we can move forward,'' Gerima showed audiences the horror of the
slave past. In ``Adwa'' he describes a distant triumph when an African
nation, largely armed with spears and knives, defeated a well-equipped and
organized Italian military bent on colonization.

The ``Adwa'' story is one Gerima, born in Gondor, Ethiopia, in 1946,
learned from his father.

``I didn't pay attention to it much, I was too busy studying European and
American history, and Adwa got banished into the back of my reality,'' said
Gerima, who studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and is
now a professor of film at Howard University in Washington.

But in 1996, on its 100th anniversary, Gerima decided to make a movie
about the battle, which he remembered, ironically, after reading about it in
writings by African Americans.

With the help of a grant from German television and money from his own
Negodgwad Productions and Mypheduh Films distribution company, he
went to Ethiopia to find the elders who could tell him the story that lived in
their memory but had been lost to the history books.

``I call it 'Sankofating' back to 'Adwa.' I'm utilizing that means of expression
in my own field of cinema by bringing about things that I have lost or bringing
about things that are on the back of the shelf,'' he said.

ADWA LIVES IN MEMORY

The battle of Adwa began on March 1, 1896, with more than 50,000
Ethiopian men and women on donkeys and mules facing nearly 20,000
well-armed Italian troops on horseback.

One press account at the time said that by nightfall the Italian army ``no
longer existed.'' News of the outcome of the battle at Adwa was transmitted
worldwide. There were other resistance movements in Africa but no victory
on the continent before Adwa had culminated in independence.

``It was a major disaster for people who felt that Europeans were civilized
and that they would triumph all over the world,'' Gerima said, adding that
after a brief flurry of press reports news of the battle was suppressed.

``They didn't want most of the colonies to really know this information and it
got lost in the process.''

Gerima set out to find it. Not in the history books, which, when they
mentioned Adwa at all, gave a European interpretation of the story. And not
on historic maps, which had been drawn by Italians. Gerima went to the
towns and villages, along the route from Addis Ababa to Adwa that
Ethiopian Emperor Menelik took before the battle, to speak with anyone
who remembered.

``Anybody could do the film,'' he said. ``I felt I should do it how it was
remembered, from the song to the chant to the literal remembrance. What I
felt for Adwa, to make the mountains and roads speak, I needed to stop
wherever I could and look for old people.''

The film begins with the question, ``Why didn't you come earlier if you
wanted to learn history?''

Gerima said that was the question an old man posed when he asked about
Adwa. ``He told me he was too old, I should have come earlier,'' Gerima
said. Luckily, the filmmaker did find other elders who were not too old to
recount the story.

He collected 20 hours of interviews for the 90-minute film -- from elders
whose fathers and mothers fought at Adwa to children who still sang the
proud songs of an African people who retained their independence while
their neighbors succumbed to European armies.

``What we were finding was different folkloric forms of remembrance. It's
amazing how precisely it's transmitted with a melody,'' said Gerima, whose
film leaves a viewer with that very impression of a song.

Now, back in the United States after debuting ``Adwa'' at the Venice Film
Festival, he is left to knock on doors and rent theaters in the hope its sweet
strains will reach his audience. ''With a documentary it will be an uphill
battle,'' he admitted.

Gerima could try to interest Hollywood again but he said he is not willing to
compromise the stories he is committed to doing. ``It's not easy, what I do. It
takes me years. But this weekend in Los Angeles I sat down with a
(filmmaker) friend who said they cannot do the story they want to do. The
stories are always compromised,'' he said.

``In some ways black filmmakers have a great deal of anxiety,'' he added. ``I
would have had a heart attack.''