Thursday, January 20, 2000

WILMINGTON, NC- Haile Gerima will give a lecture Friday, Jan. 28, at 7 p.m. in UNCW's Cameron Auditorium, Room 105, on his highly acclaimed movie Sankofa, which is an Akan word that means return to the past to go forward. Written, directed, and produced by Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Gerima, Sankofa, is a powerful film about Maafa, the African holocaust.

Done from an African/African-American perspective, this story is immensely different from the generally distorted representations of African people that Hollywood gives us. The movie centers on the experiences of a young model, on location in Africa, who re-lives her past in a unique way. It focuses on the contemporary reality of African slave descendants and it connects enslaved black people with their African past and culture. After opening the 43rd International Film Festival in Berlin in 1993, and earning top honors in competitions in both Milan and Burkina Faso, Sankofa has been hailed by critics.

Haile Gerima was born in Gondor Ethiopia in 1946, and came to the United States in 1967 to study at Chicago's Goodman School of Drama. Gerima went on to receive his Master of Fine Arts degree from UCLA in 1976. He is now a tenured professor of film at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who has also received the Rockefeller Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Gerima hopes his film Sankofa, will be used as a platform for Diaspora Africans to discuss the African Holocaust. Tickets: Students w/ID-Free, UNCW Faculty/Staff-Free, Public-$5 in advance at the University Union Information Desk, $7 at the door.