A Chat with Haile Gerima: Part II

The second part of IndieWire’s “Shadow and Act” interview with L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Haile Gerima is now available.

Gerima talks about the impact of the L.A. Rebellion saying, “It really taught me how to do everything. We taught each other. We worked on each other’s films…People like Charles Burnett and Larry Clark, they had a big impact on my own work.”

In addition to discussing the current state of black cinema (“the problem now is the black art is completely undermined by the black bourgeoisie”) and even Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Django Unchained (2012), Gerima touches upon the legacy of two of his films that screened as part of the Archive’s “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema” Exhibition, Bush Mama (1975/1979) and Sankofa (1993).

“I may not have a claim,” Gerima says, “of how distributed I am all over the world, but what comes to me are all the black people who hugged me after doing Sankofa.  That to me was the biggest capital I ever received, and it’s emotional, it’s very visceral.”

For the full interview visit “Shadow and Act: On Cinema of The African Diaspora.” 

—Meg Weichman, UCLA Film & Television Archive.