Summary:
While on a photo shoot in the site of a former slave castle, a self-absorbed African American model is magically transported back to a Jamaican plantation where she experiences the realities of slavery first-hand. Having experienced a slave revolt and joining a maroon colony, she returns to her present-day life with a deepened connection to her past, and a renewed sense of racial solidarity.
Analysis:
Sankofa (1993), like its Ethiopian-born filmmaker Haile Gerima, is important both in African and African American cinema history. One of the few internationally known Anglophone African filmmakers,1 Gerima was a member of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers (also known as the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement) along with Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, and others.2 The movement, which emerged from UCLA in the 1960s–1980s, is characterised by the filmmakers’ loosely shared set of . . . Read More