CYCLE GERIMA / BURNETT : SANKOFA Hailé Gerima will be present
2018-10-09
Continuation of the cycle started in February 2018 "Young, gifted and black" on the cinema of Haile Gerima and Charles Burnett.
For this new appointment, Heure Exquise! presents two films by Haile Gérima - Sankofa and Teza - and Charles Burnett's Warming by the Devil's fire
Haile Gerima is a senior figure in Washington where he has lived for decades in Addis where he is rightly considered the father of Ethiopian cinema or in Ouaga, the historical capital of African cinema. He defines himself as a "committed and independent filmmaker of the Third World".
Sankofa is the eighth film made by Ethiopian director Haile Gerima, who has been living in exile in the United States since 1967. Based on an original script, written by the filmmaker himself, Sankofa is a slave narrative which, however, has no historical value since it was developed through creative writing. Gerima pays little attention to historical details as he retraces the time journey of a young African-American woman, Mona, into the past of slavery during a visit of Cape Coast Castle. Between present-day Ghana and the American plantation of the past, the filmmaker overcomes the time and space gap to develop diasporic consciousness. Sankofa promotes an Afrocentric discourse on the memory of slavery, which we will examine through a detailed study of its representation of the past and of the construction of the female black body on screen.
(source : extrait de Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) : la mémoire de l’esclavage dans la conscience diasporique
Delphine Letort - texte intégral : Transatlantica - Revue d'études américaines)
