SANKOFA
Directed by Haile Gerima
Ghana, Jamaica, USA, 1993, 125 min.
This powerful film, which opened our 5th festival in 1995, catapulted Haile Gerima onto the world stage of filmmaking. A parable of African-American enslavement and resistance, the film tells the story of Mona, an African-American fashion model on a photo shoot at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. Under the influence of a traditional Sankofa priest, she is transported back in time to a sugarcane plantation in the Americas, where she becomes Shola, an enslaved African woman. She experiences firsthand the brutality of the slave system and undergoes a personal and cultural awakening. Sankofa derives its title from the Akan symbol for looking back to the past in order to move forward. In English.
