Gerima was born and raised in Gondar, Ethiopia, where he sat around the fire engrossed in the tales told by parents and grandparents. His father, a dramatist and playwright who traveled across the Ethiopian countryside staging local plays, was perhaps his greatest influence, nurturing a love of the art.
He immigrated to the United States in 1968, at the age of twenty-one, with an interest in theatre. In Chicago, he enrolled in acting classes at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago. “When I was growing up,” he reveals in the Los Angeles Times, “I wanted to work in theatre—it never occurred to me I could be a filmmaker because I was raised on Hollywood movies that pacified me to be subservient. Film making isn’t encouraged or supported by the Ethiopian government.” He felt limited by theatre and was resigned, notes Francoise Pfaff, to “subservient roles in Western plays.” By 1970 he had discovered “the power of cinema.”
He migrated to California to attend the University of California, where he earned Bachelor’s and Master of Fine Arts degrees in film. At UCLA he, along with award-winning filmmakers Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep”), Jamaa Fanaka (“Penitentiary”), Ben Caldwell (“I and I”), Larry Clark (not the Larry Clark who directed Kids) and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) was a member of the Los Angeles School of Black filmmakers.
Influenced in part by the pioneering work of film luminaries Vittorio de Sica, Fernando Solanas, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Med Hondo, Gerima makes films that tell of the human condition. He exploits the medium as a political weapon and as a catalyst for understanding and social change at the same time, consciously eschewing what he describes as the narrative dictatorship of Hollywood pictures.
By the time Gerima graduated in 1976, he had completed four films: Hour Glass (1972); Child of Resistance (1972); Bush Mama (1976); and, Mirt Sost Shi Amit (also known as Harvest: 3,000 Years; 1976)
Gerima’s 1976 “Bush Mama”, produced during the period of film history known as the Blaxploitation era, is in stark with that era as its depiction of the travails of black life and culture are far removed from that of the drug deals and revenge killings of Superfly (1972) and Foxy Brown (1976). Bush Mama is the story of Dorothy and her husband T.C., a discharged Vietnam veteran who thought he would return home to a “hero’s welcome.” Instead he is falsely arrested and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Theirs is a world of welfare, perennial unemployment, and despair. To some, the film may appear bleak and nihilistic with its stark black-and-white photography, but its message is moving and distinct. Issues of institutionalized racism, police brutality, and poverty remain sadly pertinent and the film, nearly twenty-five years old, retains its potency.
For the production of Mirt Sost Shi Amit (Harvest: 3,000 Years) Gerima returned to his native Ethiopia to produce the tale of a poor peasant family who eke out an existence within a brutal, exploitative, and feudal system of labor.
1978’s Wilmington 10—USA 10,000 exposed the impact of racism and the shortcomings of the criminal justice system by examining the infamous history of the nine black men and one white woman who became known as the Wilmington 10.
In 1982 he again focused his camera upon the travails of black urban life in the two-hour film, Ashes and Embers (film)|Ashes and Embers, the story of a moody and disillusioned Black veteran of the Vietnam War.
After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985) is a reverent and absorbing documentary about the famous Black poet Sterling Brown.
Gerima is perhaps best known as the writer, producer and director of the acclaimed 1993 film Sankofa. This historically inspired dramatic tale of African resistance to slavery has won international acclaim, awarded first prize at the African Film Festival in Milan, Italy; Best Cinematography at Africa’s premier Festival of Pan African Countries known as FESPACO; and nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film festival, where it competed with other Hollywood films. In addition, the film captured the imagination of huge audiences across the United States, many of whom waited in long lines and filled theaters for weeks on end. In so doing, the film defied the notion that signing with mainstream distributors was the only option for filmmakers to have the public see their films. Guided by an independent philosophy, Gerima practiced an innovative strategy in distribution whose success remains unprecedented in African American film history.
“Spirit of the dead, rise up and claim your story!” as its haunting opening, it presents with brutal realism, the horrors of African slavery. The story is revealed through the eyes of Mona, a modern-day woman who is possessed by spirits and transported back in time as Shola, a house slave on the Lafayette plantation in Louisiana. The savagery and violence of the evil institution are clearly disturbing and go far beyond the safe and conventional images of slavery presented by Hollywood. In Sankofa, we hear the chilling sound of human flesh as it is seared with a hot branding iron and see the barren faces of the human cargo; women are stripped of all dignity and subject to the continual sexual exploitation of their owners; human necks are enclosed in iron shackles; and rape is used as a tool of terror and domination. Some panned Gerima for his stylistic flourishes but the response by the black community was positive and enthusiastic. The film was well-received and played to full houses for many weeks in major cities.
Imperfect Journey (1994), is a BBC-commissioned film that explores the political and psychic recovery of the Ethiopian people after the atrocities and political repression or red terror of the military junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam. The filmmaker questions the direction of the succeeding government and the will of the people in creating institutions guaranteeing their liberation.
1999’s Adwa: An African Victory is a compelling documentary drama of the history of the 1896 battle of resistance in which the Ethiopian people arose and united to defeat the Italian army. The film is skillfully interlaced with paintings, sound, music, rare historical photographs, and interviews of elders who recall the details of the story of Adwa. It concludes with a dramatic recreation of the final battle.
Gerima’s most recent film is Teza (2008). Set in Ethiopia and Germany, the film chronicles the return of an Ethiopian intellectual to his country of birth during the repressive Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam and the recognition of his own displacement and powerlessness at the dissolution of his people’s humanity and social values. After several years spent studying medicine in Germany, Anberber returns to Ethiopia only to find the country of his youth replaced by turmoil. His dream of using his craft to improve the health of Ethiopians is squashed by a military junta that uses scientists for their own political ends. Seeking the comfort of his countryside home, Anberber finds no refuge from violence. The solace that the memories of his youth provide is quickly replaced by the competing forces of military and rebelling factions. Anberber needs to decide whether he wants to bear the strain or piece together a life from the fragments that lay around him.
Gerima distributes and promotes his films himself through Mypheduh Films Inc., a distribution company for low-budget, independent films that he and his wife of 12 years, Sirikiana Aina (who is also a filmmaker), established in 1984.
“I’m a third-world, independent filmmaker,” declared Haile Gerima in a 1983 interview.
Though now well-established and respected as a filmmaker, Gerima, like many independent filmmakers, has failed to capture a mainstream audience, a reality he finds bittersweet. “I was never enamored of the film industry,” he reveals in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Every Hollywood story is Eurocentric and if it isn’t, then it will simply be disregarded. So I never wanted to be part of an industry that fails to represent the world as it really exists.”
In spite of numerous limitations and against all odds, Gerima has succeeded in a tough industry for nearly thirty years and has emerged as one of the more potent outsider voices in the history of filmmaking. —wikipedia
