Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima, best known as a pioneer of the L.A. Rebellion movement, held court this afternoon in the Delphi-Filmpalast following the debut screening of Black Lions – Roman Wolves, his first feature project since 2008.
Gerima arrived at the screening alongside his L.A. Rebellion comrade Charles Burnett, who is in Berlin to debut a restoration of his 1983 family drama My Brother’s Wedding. The two filmmakers will hold a joint keynote session in Berlin on Tuesday, Feb 17.
This afternoon, however, Black Lions – Roman Wolves screened in two parts, with another three parts screening tomorrow in Berlin. The film’s overall runtime is 531 minutes. Told through a complex mix of archival footage and contemporary interviews with eyewitnesses, Black Lions is an expansive history of Italy’s brutal colonial campaign in Ethiopia.
Opening the Q&A session following the screening, Gerima told the audience that it took him 30 years to complete the project and explained why he decided to embark on the lengthy production.
“I set out to do a film right around 1996 because I was fed up with Italians and their fake history of Ethiopia and the Italian invasion,” Gerima told the packed crowd inside the Filmpalast. “Upon just seeing me, the guilt always made them say stupid things that didn’t correlate with my mother’s experience, my grandmother’s experience, or my father’s experience. So I had to do a film.”
Gerima was born in Ethiopia and moved to the United States in 1963, where he has lived ever since. Continuing on the film’s origins, Gerima told the audience that he was “raised under the miseducation of the British education system after the Italian war.”
“I was born after the war, but the educational system was transformed from a traditional Ethiopian school to the British design, and I was completely miseducated with the British idea of this history,” he said. “So I set out to do something. I just wanted to learn more.”
Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 under Mussolini. The country’s campaign in Ethiopia was brutal and included the illegal use of poisonous mustard gas. At the direction of Mussolini, Italian filmmakers meticulously photographed the events of the war. The graphic footage has been held in archives across Europe since then and now serves as the base of Black Lions, a paradox that was not lost on Gerima.
“My people did not film, so I wanted to see how I could use the Italian point of view, which was often a racist one,” he said. “How can I use that image depicted by the Italian against itself?”
Gerima continued to explain that untangling film production from its violent colonial past was a constant battle.
“Italian neorealism actually comes from Mussolini’s envisioned idea of cinema. Venice was Mussolini’s idea. Istituto Luce was Mussolini’s idea. Cinecitta was Mussolini’s idea,” Gerima said.
“In the next part, you’ll see that Mussolini once said that cinema is the most powerful weapon. And I kept thinking, how should I use this weapon? This weapon that was used against me, dwarfed my people, demonized my people, barbarized my people.”
He added: “It’s a constant struggle, and in the process, what you see is what grew, however imperfect, in five parts. I’m sharing with you the permanent idea of this issue.”
Interestingly, Gerima also noted that his struggles with the archive were not only philosophical but physical. He told the audience that for many years, he was unable to gain access to much of the footage held in film archives across Italy.
“If you see my email, I have Italian professors who tried to intervene by letter. The mayor of Rome tried to intervene by letter. So it is a complete frustration trying to gain the rights to the footage they shot of my people,” he told the audience.
The veteran filmmaker said that moving forward, he aims to create a public discussion around film archives with the aim of improving access for African filmmakers.
“We have already drafted a petition to mobilize society so that African filmmakers, especially, have the right to the footage taken by colonial masters,” he said. “We have the right to the archive.”
Black Lions – Roman Wolves was produced by Gerima and his partner, Shirikiana Aina Gerima. Their company Mypheduh Films is handling sales on the title.
Berlin runs until Feb 22.