Gerima Debuts 10-Hour Doc at BlackStar Festival
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Haile Gerima's five-part, 10-hour documentary 'Black Lions – Roman Wolves' examines Italy's colonial legacy in Ethiopia through archival footage and eyewitness interviews, with its first U.S. public screening set for Philadelphia's BlackStar Film Festival
- Gerima spent decades fighting Italian bureaucracy — specifically gatekeepers at the Luce national film archive built by Mussolini — to access colonial-era footage of his own ancestors, and will launch a six-city Italian screening tour plus petition in October and November demanding free archive access for future African filmmakers
- Gerima and his wife funded the film entirely through crowdfunding and personal savings, following a marriage agreement to reinvest all film earnings back into filmmaking — he says no one else will finance his intellectual perspective
- Berlin Film Festival screened the film in its complete form in February to strong audiences and honored Gerima with its honorary Berlinale Camera award for career achievement, his first feature since 2008's Venice-premiering 'Teza'
- Gerima's concurrent dormant documentary project on America's Black Maroons is now back in editing, tracing armed Africans allied with Native Americans who fought the U.S. government — including Florida's Seminole Wars — with some deported into Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico
- Gerima rejects the 'L.A. Rebellion' label as a myth that flattens the diverse third-world filmmaker movement at UCLA, arguing Black community rebellion, not the filmmakers themselves, kept the group ideologically grounded
Why it matters: Gerima's insistence on retaining 10 hours of runtime and refusing streaming platforms signals a deliberate counter-model to industrial documentary distribution. His October petition to Italy's Luce archive targets a structural barrier — costly access to colonial footage — that affects every African filmmaker trying to tell pre-independence history on their own terms.
Ask SkimNews
