Haile Gerima's sweeping, powerful 'Sankofa,' which in the African language of Akan means returning to the past in order to go forward, opens in the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, an ancient fortress where slaves bound for America were kept in chains. While a group of tourists visit the site, a photographer snaps away at a beautiful African fashion model named Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano). Suddenly Sankofa (Kofi Ghanaba)--an older man in native robes who communicates with the spirits through his drums--appears, decrying the white tourists for invading a sacred place and zeroing in on Mona, ordering her sternly to 'Get back to your past!' Unnerved, Mona retreats into the castle's ground floor--only to discover herself part of a group of slaves soon to be transported to a plantation in the American South.

Haile Gerima’s American masterpiece has had a transformative impact on audiences. The film follows Mona, an African American model on a fashion shoot in. Powerful, moving and highly acclaimed, director Haile Gerima’s Sankofa is a masterpiece of cinema that has had a transformative impact on audiences since its. 144 Strand Dna Activation Lords Of Karma. In this 1993 film by Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Gerima. Sankofa, an Akan word meaning. Is now complete and available for download.

The Ethiopian-born Gerima, best known for 'Bush Mama'--his 1976 portrait of an impoverished woman living in Watts--has brought a distinctive style and an often raw but always authoritative command of his medium to confront the horrors of slavery and its persisting significance, perhaps as no other filmmaker has. Vsdc Free Video Editor Manuale Scolare there. The bold, dramatic manner in which Gerima sweeps Mona back into the past signals that what's to come will be both different and dynamic. Operatic in style, 'Sankofa' brings to mind Julie Dash's 'Daughters of the Dust' in its use of highly theatrical tableaux, of rituals, of traditions of African storytelling and of its sense of the supernatural--in this instance, recurring images of birds, symbolic of flight as well as life and death. 'Sankofa' unfolds as a kind of oratorio--the film's music in itself is incredibly rich and intoxicating--in which people deal with terrible cruelty through ritual and incantations of the African gods. It is a celebration of the strength of black people, in drawing upon their spiritual roots, to defy their oppressors--past and present alike. Gerima's stylized approach is crucial because what he presents is so luridly familiar: a white plantation overseer forcing slaves to beat, even to death, other slaves; couples and families cruelly, arbitrarily separated; slaves receiving terrible punishments for daring to run away.