EDITOR’S NOTE: The retro is being rebooted for runs in Philly, Toronto and New York through February. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be revisiting our reviews/write-ups/interviews on the series (from Brandon Wilson and Nijla Mumin) when it begun in Los Angeles over a year ago here’s another. The overview and complete lineup speak for themselves, so click to head over to the home site for the series. Sankofa is an Akan word meaning roughly, “We must go back and reclaim our past in order to move forward.” ’s cinematic rendering of this is perhaps one of his greatest filmmaking achievements.

Free Mcboot 1 8 Codebreaker For Ps2. Screened this weekend as part of the UCLA L.A. Rebellion Film Series at the Hammer Museum, the film follows Shola, a black model who is transported back to a West Indian plantation after participating in a fashion shoot on shores of the slave castles in Ghana.

Shola becomes a house slave alongside Shango, a militant Maroon fieldhand and love interest who resists her early warnings to ignore the brutalities committed against others on the plantation. Sexually abused by the plantation’s owner, Shola is drawn to Nunu, an African-born fieldhand and Maroon leader, who ignites her eventual rebellion. As a student in Howard University’s MFA Film Program, I took a class with Haile Gerima, called Third World Cinema.

In it, he challenged many of our notions and beliefs about filmmaking, especially when it came to telling stories about people of color. One of those challenges was to scrutinize black “stock” characters in American films, or those black characters that had no back-story, but were just there to uphold white characters’ place or status. He presented a number of films where this type of black character existed- Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, and even Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. All are classic Hollywood films, but they position the black body as one of complete servitude. There exists no richness or complication within these characters. Free Call Free Text Unlimited Minutes more. Gerima encouraged us to break and subvert that paradigm.