Imperfect Journey

A documentary on the Wilmington 10, 9 afro-Americans and 1 white woman who were unjustly imprisoned. 4K digital restoration by the Academy Film Archive released in 2021.

In 1957, Ghana was the first African country to become independent of its colonial rulers, in this case the British. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of what in 1960 became the Republic of Ghana, called on Africans from all over the world to come to Ghana to help build the new nation. The most important aim was to "undo the damage caused by the slave trade" as filmmaker Shirikiana Aina expressed it in her documentary Footprints of Pan Africanism. Several people speak in Aina’s film about the reconstruction of Ghana and Nkrumah, who was deposed in 1966, offering room for their frequently gripping personal stories. These are often marked by racism, the emerging civil rights movement and what it’s like to be black and live elsewhere. For many, returning to Africa was like going home.

The Ethiopian intellectual Anberber returns to his native country during the repressive totalitarian regime of Haile Mariam Mengistu and the recognition of his own displacement and powerlessness at the dissolution of his people's humanity and social values. After several years spent studying medicine in Germany, he finds the country of his youth replaced by turmoil. His dream of using his craft to improve the health of Ethiopians is squashed by a military junta that uses scientists for its own political ends. Seeking the comfort of his countryside home, Anberber finds no refuge from violence. The solace that the memories of his youth provide is quickly replaced by the competing forces of military and rebelling factions. Anberber needs to decide whether he wants to bear the strain or piece together a life from the fragments that lie around him.

In the midst of the Black consciousness movement, a basketball player imagines his profession to that of a gladiator. After a series of reflections including his upbringing as a foster child of White Americans, he returns to his origins.

Ashes and Embers is an original screenplay by Haile Gerima, about a Vietnam veteran, who, several years after the war, is struggling to come to terms with his role in the war, and his role as a Black person in America. He survives by working odd jobs in Washington, D.C. and living with his girlfriend and her son. When criticism of his alienated behavior come from her and a father figure too often, he runs to the streets or to his grandmother's rural house in Virginia. Her criticism and his memories of the past both send him fleeing again to Los Angeles, where he is surrounded by superficial people who have forgotten how to be compassionate human beings. It is here that the advice of his friends and grandmother combine to transform him from an embittered ex-soldier to a strong and confident man.

In 1896, Ethiopia, an African nation, largely armed with spears and knives, defeats a well-equipped and organized Italian military bent on colonization.

The film opens in 1945 with a young boy playing in his Chicago neighborhood, and then follows the adult Jita-Hadi as a returning Marine with heightened political consciousness.

A woman dressed in a robe, hands bound, is being transported through a barroom into a jail cell, directly outside of which later appears a jury box filled with jurors. Linearity is rejected as space is treated poetically, following the coordinates of a propulsive social idea - the social imprisonment of black women.

In this meditative film the everyday lives of poor Ethiopian peasants are shown using documentary as well as storytelling techniques, with its drama arising out of the timeless yet persistent issues of their lives.

Dorothy is a poor black woman. Her husband is put in jail for no observable reason, and she is pregnant with a second child. The government threatens to take away her welfare if she does not get an abortion.

On a photo shoot in Ghana, an American model slips back in time, becomes enslaved on a plantation and bears witness to the agony of her ancestral past.

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Decades in the making, Haile Gerima's sweeping survey of Italy's brutal colonial legacy in Ethiopia is a monumental reckoning with suppressed history. With a balladeer's spirit, Gerima forges an epic ballad of resistance, freedom and national pride.