In Conversation with HAILE GERIMA Baker Center Ohio University Athens, Ohio Thursday, April 14th 2011

Abstract

Baker CenterOhio UniversityAthens, OhioThursday, April 14th 2011The following interview with the celebrated filmmaker Haile Gerima took place during the 37th Annual Conference of the African Literature Association. He was asked to speak about his involvement with FESPACO and the Paul Robeson Prize.Boyd: How did you become involved with FESPACO?Gerima: Mme. Alimata Salambere, one of the founders of the Ouagadougou film festival, came to Howard University. There were a lot of filmmakers, teachers and community people who came to hear her. She wanted the participation of African-Americans in the Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou. She also asked me to be on a jury that year, which is how I went for the first time. When I became recognized as an artist I was invited to the festival but I never got the ticket to travel so I never went. I ended up in Ouagadougou for the first time when Mme Salambere invited me to serve on a jury. And once I was there, I met Ousmane Sembene who also asked me how we could get African-American film practitioners, scholars, and historians to become part of FESPACO.Boyd:That was in what year?Gerima: It was the very early 80s. I can't remember the actual year but it was the year that I was a jury member. Sembene was the president of the jury and I said to him that it would be fantastic for African-Americans to come to the festival. The problem after that time has been that the participation was limited to Africans from the continent and even if it was from the continent, it was primarily francophone Africans who attended the Ouagadougou film festival. Then Thomas Sankara also made it be known that he wanted African-American participation. At that time Sankara was Minister of Information and that's why he was pushing this agenda.Boyd: So he wasn't president yet?Gerima: No, he was not yet president. And so after my return to the US from Ouagadougou, I along with my wife Shirikiana and two other advisors (even though it was for the most part Shirkiana and me); we worked out a panel discussion dealing with production, exhibition, distribution and the kind of collaboration that could result from African diaspora and continental African film professionals. All these topics called forth the professors, historians and filmmakers who were invited to participate in the panel discussion at the next FESPACO. We still have the list of the people who arrived. Among them were Larry Clark, Cham Mbye, and Francoise Pfaff. INAFEC, the film school in Burkina Faso, was the co-sponsor of this Diaspora Conference that took place in the middle of the FESPACO festival and it was well-attended, especially by young people. The main idea was to forge collaborative relationship between the continent and the diaspora. We stressed that we wanted not only to make film but to train also. We needed to train each other for filmmaking profession. And that same year we proposed to create a Paul Robeson Prize. I talked to Gaston Kabore and a few other people, to Philippe Sawadogo also. And I expressed to them the reason why we should choose Paul Robeson. Paul Robeson came up as my idea because of the way he played in cinema. For me, in his autobiography Here I Stand, he revealed that he was one of the very first actors who made the distinction of the artist. Robeson examined the ideology of the actor with questions such as: Is he neutral? Who is he serving with his creative talent? The other part that attracted to him was the fact that even in the films he made from the script, when he finally realized the film was edited to say something different, he marched against it; he marched against his own films himself. Not many black actors would march against stereotype films that they participated in. Robeson's political stance, the fact that he was in film and that he was an extension of the W.E.B. DuBois kind of movement, we felt that he was the logical person, that it was his name that we needed to have for the prize. …