Sankofa – Directed by Haile Gerima

Directed by Haile Gerima in 1993, the Ethiopian production “Sankofa” mystically and viscerally centered Black diaspora in a slave narrative. The idiosyncratic film opens with a Black man with white body paint banging on a set of drums while dissolves of sun-smeared fields complement underneath, leading to an intoxicating invocation to those Black souls lost during the Atlantic slave trade to rise up and tell their stories. At the outset, “Sankofa” is what co-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz wanted 2020’s “Antebellum” to be. Similar to that film, a modern-day Black woman is transported back to slavery. But Gerima’s film thrums with a reverence for the ancestors who lived through that historical trauma that’s not at all present in Bush and Renz’s exploitative work.

“Sankofa” didn’t receive distribution upon its initial release. Instead, Gerima self-distributed the film to independent cinemas across the country, and it’s not been widely seen since then. Ava DuVernay’s Array via Netflix is now re-releasing a 4k restoration of the film, and the result is a visually striking unearthing of an important chapter in world cinema.

Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano), the film’s protagonist, is a present-day African-American model sporting a leopard print bathing suit and orange Tina Turner inspired hair, working a photoshoot on a Ghana beach in the shadows of Cape Coast Castle. During the trans-Atlantic slave trade the castle was the lost stop before Africans confronted the further horror of traveling to America. It was “the point of no return.” In the opening scenes, Gerima’s lens peers over the now-antique cannons that line the white-sand walls, looking toward the tangerine sun-soaked beaches below, wherein Ghanians laugh, play, and prepare to fish.