Roll Call Africa Hall of Fame™ · Inaugural Induction 2026
Haile Gerima
Ethiopia · Director, Writer & Producer · b. 1946
In February 2026, at the 76th Berlinale, Haile Gerima received the Berlinale Camera — the festival’s honour for figures who have made exceptional contributions to world cinema. He received it for Black Lions, Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa, a nine-hour documentary thirty years in the making about Italy’s fascist occupation of Ethiopia in 1935-1941 and the resistance that ultimately expelled it. He was seventy-nine years old. He was still making the films that needed to be made.
The Berlinale jury noted that his work “bears witness to histories marked by oppression, resistance, and the unfinished project of decolonization — stories that speak with particular urgency to the present moment.” This was the Berlinale’s recognition. The recognition that matters more, for this Hall of Fame, is simpler: Gerima has spent more than fifty years refusing to accept the conditions that the mainstream film industry, the mainstream distribution system, and the mainstream critical establishment tried to impose on his work. He refused so consistently, and built so many parallel systems in the refusal, that the refusal itself became a body of work.
What He Built
When Gerima graduated from UCLA in 1976 as part of the generation of filmmakers who became known as the Los Angeles Rebellion — alongside Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Ben Caldwell — he had already made four films. Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), his MFA thesis film shot in Ethiopia, won the Grand Prize and Silver Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival that year. It is a film of extraordinary formal patience — 150 minutes about a poor peasant farmer in Ethiopia’s feudal system, shot in Amharic, with a formal rigour that owes more to the Ethiopian storytelling tradition his playwright father gave him than to anything he studied in California.
Bush Mama (1979) is set in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles and follows Dorothy, a Black woman on welfare whose husband has been imprisoned, as she is radicalised by the conditions around her. It is a film of the Los Angeles Rebellion in the fullest sense: politically urgent, formally experimental, made in a community for a community, with a camera that respects its subjects rather than observing them.
Sankofa (1993) is Gerima’s most celebrated film internationally and the one that demonstrated the scale of the audience he had been building for twenty years without institutional support. The film — about the slave trade as experienced by a modern Ghanaian model who is transported back in time to a Louisiana plantation — was rejected by every American distributor. Gerima took it on tour. He booked theatres himself, drove the film from city to city, connected directly with African American and diaspora communities, and built the audience that the industry said did not exist. The film eventually grossed more than $2.5 million in the United States through this parallel distribution system. He then used the proceeds to open Sankofa Video, Books and Café in Washington DC — a cultural infrastructure that has been operating since 1996.
Teza (2008) won the Osella d’Oro for Best Screenplay and the Special Jury Prize at Venice. It won the Golden Tanit and four additional prizes at Carthage Film Festival. It is a film about an Ethiopian intellectual who studies medicine in Germany, returns home after the fall of the Derg dictatorship, and finds a country that has been broken by the violence of the regime and the exile of an entire generation of its educated class. It is Gerima’s most autobiographical film, and among the most complete artistic statements in African cinema.
The Infrastructure Is the Argument
What distinguishes Haile Gerima from most filmmakers of his generation and stature is not only the films but the systems he built around them. Mypheduh Films Inc., the distribution company he and his wife Shirikiana Aina founded in 1984, has distributed not only his own films but the work of other African and African diaspora filmmakers who could not access mainstream distribution channels. The Sankofa bookstore, still operating across the street from Howard University in Washington DC, has been a community space for African cinema, literature, and political thought for thirty years. Howard University’s film programme, where he has taught since 1975, has trained generations of African and African American filmmakers who carry his influence into their own work.
He has said that his formal given name — Mypheduh, given to him by his father — means “sacred shield of culture” in the Ge’ez language. He has spent fifty years being exactly that. The culture he has shielded is not only Ethiopian culture or African culture or diasporic culture — it is the culture of cinema made by people who refuse the conditions under which the mainstream says the work must be made.
He is seventy-nine years old. He screened a nine-hour film at the Berlinale three months ago. The trajectory does not stop.
Inducted into the Roll Call Africa Hall of Fame™, May 2026. Inaugural Class.
— Wanjiru Kamau, Nairobi. Roll Call Africa.
FILMOGRAPHY: Hour Glass (1971) · Child of Resistance (1972) · Harvest: 3000 Years (1976) · Bush Mama (1979) · Wilmington 10 – U.S.A. 10,000 (1979) · Ashes and Embers (1982) · After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985) · Sankofa (1993) · Imperfect Journey (1994) · Adwa: An African Victory (1999) · Teza (2008) · Black Lions, Roman Wolves (2026)
