Haile Gerima Quotes
b. 1946
Haile Gerima (born 19 Mrch 1946)is an Ethiopian filmmaker who lives and works in the United States. He is a leading member of the L.A.
Random Haile Gerima quote
45 quotes
How willing are you to be your own spectator, your own audienœ—just to look at what you're doing as it happens?
The script is written in front of us. All we have to do is amplify it with the camera, put the light on it.
It’s important to defend how you think, converted, inverted, concave, it doesn’t matter.
I’m interested in humanizing facts. Facts have to be nationalized by human emotion because facts have been dehumanized, decapitated from the people who need them, and used as a weapon against them.
What are we doing here unless we have young Black people behind us to take over?
“So, I shot that sequence in Jamaica, then a year later went to Africa and completed the rest of the film in three weeks.”
In America everybody is silent about the oppression and the bad condition of people who are outsiders. Nobody seems to care
I've always believed that the more you endorse the new system you bring about, the more you become like the very people you overthrew
“I may not have a claim, 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.”
I’ve always felt that your strength has to come from a community you have a certain affinity with
To put a perfect human being [on screen] with no contradiction is, to me, fascist
I prefer boring you to death than submitting to this hip-hop, fast cut, very non-transactional bombardment of audiences
We forget that barefoot Black people, the day they hit this continent, resisted
You need to hold hands collectively, even with people you can’t agree with
“ ‘Sankofa’ is our first success using this methodology,”
When the oppressors realize that the world cannot be ruled by savagery anymore, then history will testify on behalf of those who are powerless now
I see that women in all societies still play the role of outsiders—even when they participate
Without a community, it’s hard to gauge where you are in your work or your own evolution
Maybe ambitiousness is the problem. Stop being ambitious, and learn how to say no
When you suddenly become a chorus to your own destruction, it’s visible