Haile Gerima's 10-Hour Documentary Premieres in U.S
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- Black Lions – Roman Wolves, Gerima's five-part, 10-hour documentary weaving archival footage with eyewitness interviews on Italy's colonization of Ethiopia, will get its first U.S. screening at Philadelphia's BlackStar Film Festival following well-attended Berlin runs.
- Gerima spent decades fighting bureaucratic resistance at Italy's Luce national film archive to access colonial-era footage, with gatekeepers repeatedly stalling by claiming a 'fascist era' was preventing them from participating until a Ghanaian politician in Rome intervened.
- Gerima and his wife funded the film entirely through their own film-sale earnings, maintaining a self-imposed rule that every dollar earned goes back into filmmaking — and Gerima explicitly refused overtures from Netflix, Criterion, and other platforms.
- Berlin Film Festival awarded Gerima its honorary Berlinale Camera for career achievement, following his 2021 Academy Museum Vantage Award and Ava DuVernay's Array Releasing distributing restored versions of Ashes And Embers and Sankofa.
- Gerima announced a six-city Italian screening tour for October–November tied to a petition demanding free archival access to colonial footage for future African filmmakers.
- Gerima's next project, already in editing, is a documentary on America's Black Maroons — armed Africans who sometimes allied with Native Americans and fought the U.S. government through Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and Mexico.
- Gerima rejected the 'L.A. Rebellion' label as 'bullshit for white people at UCLA to make commerce out of,' arguing his UCLA cohort were products of Black community rebellions that kept them from becoming 'more Hollywood than Hollywood.'
Why it matters: Gerima's decade-long standoff with Italy's Luce archive — which stalled footage access by repeatedly citing a 'fascist era' — exposes how structural gatekeeping continues to suppress African perspectives on colonial history. With a six-city Italian petition tour launching in October, he's positioning his late-career platform to ensure the next generation of African filmmakers doesn't face the same barriers.
