Next week, veteran filmmaker Haile Gerima will take his latest feature, Black Lions – Roman Wolves, to the U.S. for its first public screening, following a series of lively showings at the Berlin Film Festival in February. 

The five-part, 10-hour documentary film will screen in its entirety across several days at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia. 

Decades in the making, Black Lions – Roman Wolves is a sweeping survey of Italy’s brutal colonial legacy in Ethiopia, told through a complex mix of archival footage and contemporary interviews with eyewitnesses. 

Black Lions – Roman Wolves is Gerima’s first feature since 2008’s Teza, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Screenplay award. Since then, many of Gerima’s early films have received renewed attention, with Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing distributing restored versions of Gerima’s Ashes And Embers (1983) and Sankofa (1993). In 2021, he was awarded the Academy Museum’s honorary Vantage Award, and following the screenings in Berlin, the festival handed Gerima its honorary Berlinale Camera award for career achievement. 

Despite new attention from the industry, the Ethiopian-born filmmaker has continued to work independently, producing Black Lions through crowdfunding campaigns and his own cash. 

Speaking with Deadline ahead of the BlackStar screening from his Sankofa production hub and bookshop in D.C., Gerima discusses his independent production process, his decades-long battle to gain access to Italy’s colonial film archive, and plans for his next film on the Black Seminoles of North America.

DEADLINE: Haile, the screenings at Berlin were so well attended, which isn’t a guarantee for everything at the festival. What did you think of it all?

HAILE GERIMA: Yes, you know, you get so bombarded by mainstream logic that the film is too long or should be cut a certain way, so when Berlin accepted it in its fullest form and the audience engaged with it, I was able to say, I was right. So I left it there, despite any imperfections here or there in the film. The audience went for it. 

DEADLINE: When you say bombarded, do you mean other festivals? 

GERIMA: No, friends and filmmakers who have come to visit me over the years, and also people who have inquired about the project. I usually don’t thank festivals at all. But the fact that Berlin accepted the film as I birthed it was a real honor.

DEADLINE: It’s a sprawling project, and I must admit, even though I am Ghanaian, I knew nothing of this history in Ethiopia. 

GERIMA: Well, my brother, you’re not alone. I myself learned my own history while making the film. Not many Ethiopians know this story or history. And they walk around with the residual trauma of this historical experience. It affects us in our daily lives. It affects us in our relationships. The ethnic and religious problems in Ethiopia right now that could pull the country into a civil war are part of that. My generation of young Ethiopians wanted to change the country, but it was a country we didn’t know because to know Ethiopia, you have to know the history. And that is why my wife and I produced this film. It’s a very costly project, but we produced it because I had to exorcise it out of myself. So you’re not alone.

DEADLINE: What was the entry point for this project? Where did you begin?

GERIMA: The first thing was my previous film on the 1896 Adwa battle, which premiered in Venice. That’s when I realized I was touching contentious ground. The Italians, not all of them, but the majority of them, felt I wasn’t entitled to tell the story from my point of view because they have their own narrative, especially about the Second World War. As I said in the film, they always remind me that they built roads and hospitals in Ethiopia. They say they weren’t like the other colonialists. I was originally interested in doing the two films together, Adwa and the 1935 fascist invasion of Ethiopia. But then in the editing room, the two stories didn’t fit together. They had to be treated separately, so we split them. 

DEADLINE: I remember in Berlin during the Q&A you said you struggled to gain access to footage held at Luce, Italy’s national film archive. How did you finally get what you needed?

GERIMA: Yes, this film took so long because of the Italian bureaucracy — not only the political bureaucracy, but also the gatekeepers of the historical archive. They were my biggest nightmare. I would go to Italy, which is very costly, and the gatekeepers at the Luce, the national film archive that Mussolini himself built, would say to me, “We’d like to be part of your movie, but now we’re experiencing a fascist era, so let’s wait a little bit.” And every fascist government would come and go. Eventually, a brother from Ghana, I believe, who was a politician in Rome, came with me to Luce to intervene. I can’t even begin to tell you what I went through to access the images of my own ancestors. In fact, in October and November, we have organized a six-city screening tour in Italy and will be launching a petition. It will be a call to mobilize filmmakers and demand that future young African filmmakers should not have to pay for access to colonial archive footage. 

DEADLINE: You work completely independently, so how did you figure out the production resources on a project like this? 

GERIMA: When my wife and I got married, we agreed not to eat film money, meaning every dollar we earn from film sales goes back into our filmmaking. She has made three films. I made this one and Adwa. We produced Sankofa together. So for us, it’s a tradition. If we don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it. Nobody is going to finance our intellectual perspective. This is how we have based our production office here in Washington. It is where I’m now editing a film on the Maroons of the United States.

DEADLINE: How do you plan to distribute Black Lions?

GERIMA: We are going to open it for a few engagements in theaters wherever we can access the screens. We’re working on some theaters now. It’s still a work in progress. But we’re also working on platforming the film. I’m committed to independence. That’s why I haven’t given any of my work to the platforms. Netflix got my film Sankofa from my sister Ava. And that was fine with my conscience because it was Ava. I always trust her instincts. She came into my life respectfully. There are a lot of people who have been asking about my films, like Criterion, especially after the New York Times criticized them for not carrying films by filmmakers of my generation. But they all neglected our films for many years. Now they are discovering us, so I’m not interested.

DEADLINE: The music in this film is incredible. I haven’t been able to get that one theme track that loops throughout out of my mind. Where did you find it?

GERIMA: Historically, I’ve mixed different music to make the soundtracks for my movies. I was going to do the same here until this musician contacted me and said, I want to donate my skills if you are interested. I said yes, thank you, come on, so it was a gift that I got at the last minute of the film. I don’t like to own anyone else’s creations, so I told him he should release the music, and I believe he will soon. 

DEADLINE: You mentioned a film about American Maroons. Can you say more about that project?

GERIMA: The Maroon project was a concurrent documentary film I was doing with Black Lions, but I had left it dormant, and I’m now picking it back up. It’s a film about the struggle against slavery. I have been able to discover this history, where armed Africans, sometimes in union with Native Americans, fought all the way to Florida. And in Florida, the longest war the United States government fought was with Black maroons called Seminoles. Some of them were eventually deported, and some went with their arms into the Oklahoma region. I have followed their story into Texas and Mexico. I’m working on it now. I can’t tell you how long it will take. It’s a long journey, but I don’t mind. I have the time to work on a film like this.

DEADLINE: You’re considered to be one of the central figures of the L.A. Rebellion era. And when parts of history become so talked about, they also become victim to a certain type of myth-making. What do you think about how that story has been told over the years?

GERIMA: All my friends know I have a different view of this so-called L.A. Rebellion. It was coined from Toni Cade Bambara’s work, but I don’t think Toni used it in the way it is now known. To me, it was a group of third-world filmmakers who were not entitled by history to make movies. We just happened to be in the same place, but it was a very diverse group. We had filmmakers from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and African Americans. So for me, I don’t buy the L.A. rebellion label. We were products of the Black rebellions of the time that didn’t allow us to be just bourgeois filmmakers. This gets forgotten, but if there was no rebellion in the Black community, the UCLA students are fundamentally petite bourgeoisie. Most of us wanted to be more Hollywood than Hollywood, so it’s the Black community that was rebelling that kept us in check.

My whole orientation is more Frantz Fanon, George Jackson, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X. These were my literary resources. Prison writing was my preoccupation at the time. Some of the best brains of Black America were in prison at that time. Charles Burnett helped me a lot. He was my teacher. Larry Clark was my supporter. He was in my crew. But ideologically, we have nothing in common. The thing we had in common was our hunger. So for me, the L.A. Rebellion is bullshit for white people at UCLA to make commerce out of.

Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.

Comments On Deadline Hollywood are monitored. So don't go off topic, don't impersonate anyone, and don't get your facts wrong.

Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() );