Sankofa (Drama)
Director: Haile Gerima
Producer: Shirikiana Aina,Haile Gerima
Screenwriter: Haile Gerima
Cinematographer: Augustin E. Cubano
Composer: David J. White
Editor: Haile Gerima
Production Designer: Kerry Marshall
Costume Designer: Tracey White
Key Cast: Mutabaruka,Oyafunmike Ogunlano,Nick Medley,Alexandra Duah,Kofi Ghanaba,Afemo Omilami
Vividly restored to 4K, this masterpiece of 90s African cinema follows a model who is transported back in time to a slave plantation.
At Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle – a site from where thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas as part of the transatlantic slave trade – Mona, an African-American model, poses for a white photographer. Enraged by this frivolous disregard for history, an elder named Sankofa magically sends Mona back in time to a North American plantation, where she becomes an enslaved woman named Shola and experiences the horrors of slavery firsthand.
A formidable work by the boundary-pushing Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Gerima – one of the key figures in the LA Rebellion movement – Sankofa (which means “go back to go forward” in the Ghanaian Akan language) is a sweeping, poetic and richly detailed saga of Black resilience, one that illuminates the African diasporic experience and underlines the urgency of engaging with ancestral roots. Its interrogation of contemporary Black American identity remains as relevant now as it was in 1993.
“Sankofa is an invocation … It calls to attention how history exists in the present, how the spirits of the long-gone can still affect today … The legacy, beauty, and humanist sensibilities contained within Sankofa still call to us today.” – RogerEbert.com
This screening will be introduced by film critic Lovia Gyarkye (The Hollywood Reporter), who will host a panel discussion with writers Angelica Jade Bastién and Bruce Koussaba following the film.
Lovia Gyarkye is a critic at The Hollywood Reporter. Previously, she was an editor at The New York Times Magazine Labs and a researcher at The New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Dissent, Aperture and The Nation. In 2024, she won an ASME Next Award for Journalists Under 30 and was a finalist for best film critic by the Los Angeles Press Club. She teaches in the arts and culture program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and lives in New York City.
Angelica Jade Bastién is a Southern-born critic and essayist for New York magazine’s site, Vulture, where she covers film and pop culture. She has written for The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, Criterion Channel Blu-ray releases and many other publications. She was nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2022. Her work can also be found on her newsletter, Madwomen & Muses. She lives in Chicago with her two cats.
Bruce Koussaba is a filmmaker and writer living on unceded Gadigal Wangal Lands. His involvement in cinema extends into criticism, festival work, programming, public speaking, and writing and directing his own film projects. He has exhibited films at Bankstown Arts Centre, Powerhouse Museum and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and presented films at Cinema Reborn, Fantastic Film Festival, AGNSW and Melbourne International Film Festival. He is currently a programmer and coordinator of Liberation Cinema, a community film program for colonial-project resistance regarding cinema as insurgent imagination and oral testimony. Bruce has a mean right hook, and he’s a ragtime gal.