At BlackStar this year, the program exemplified the festival’s ongoing commitment to spotlighting the work of LA Rebellion filmmakers whose work stands alongside Gerima’s. On opening day, Daughters of the Dust director Julie Dash premiered HomeGoing, a music video tribute to the Emmanuel Nine, in a grief-focused experimental shorts bloc titled ‘Lamentations.’ Closing day included a screening of Alile Sharon Larkin’s 1982 feature A Different Image (which never received a proper theatrical release); this was followed by a panel—moderated by Melissa Lyde of Alfreda’s Cinema, Brooklyn’s only Black woman-led microcinema—which publicly gathered Larkin, her lead actress Margòt Saxton-Federella and co-star Adisa Anderson for the first time in 42 years.
In between these events, four episodic installments of Black Lions – Roman Wolves were programmed, with a screening of the fifth and final episode closing the festival. In the documentary, Gerima blends long-form interview, hypnotic video-art sequencing and archival footage to pluck the historical line between Italy’s humiliating defeat during the 1896 Battle of Adwa in Ethiopia and Mussolini’s vengeful 1935 invasion of the African nation. During a closing-night Q&A, Gerima revealed that, for three minutes of archival material depicting Ethiopian soldiers, the Italian rights holders could demand as high as $40,000 in licensing costs, thereby upholding the very same extractive, colonial dynamic Gerima’s filmmaking so directly critiques.
“Filmmaking is a booby trap,” Gerima tells me. “Filmmaking is not a joke. It’s over a hundred years of colonial power. It’s cinema that made the United States an empire. It’s that power: from here to Nigeria, to Ethiopia, to India. We emulate every image they have.” Buried within his resolute Pan-Africanist politics and vision of fugitive filmmaking is Gerima’s lingering remorse for ever having been enticed by the “white world,” as he refers to the implicitly extractive Western approach to film and art-making itself.