Barbara Wurm: Let me ask the obvious question first: How long were you planning to make this film and what were the most important steps in developing it?
Haile Gerima: Fundamentally, it’s really my father, Abba Gerima Tafere, who wrote a book on the guerrilla warfare between Ethiopians and Italians in the region he comes from called ‘Gondere Begashaw’ (1953). And from that time on, I’ve always wanted to tell the story. It was very difficult. I remember that in the early 80s I was at a festival in Italy called Rimini Film Festival. We were watching documentaries on Vietnam, Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia. And at that conference the whole attendance of the film festival voted to request Luce, the archive, and the film festival organisers to support a film idea by me to make a film on the matter. But again, it’s the same story that there is no funding for African cinema. Many African filmmakers have scripts, have films ideas, and have died. It so happens I finished the film, and it’s almost 30 years since I started it.
Fabian Tietke: What exactly was the request to Luce?
HG: I had a big problems with Luce. For 30 years, I have e-mails, thousands of emails, with this Italian, guilt-ridden, liberal fortress I was unable to break into. And I was doing other films in the meanwhile, among them ADWA (1999), which I did in co-production with the German TV station ZDF. But I always kept in mind that I would do a documentary film on the larger issue. That’s the one that is now finished, BLACK LIONS – ROMAN WOLVES. Basically, it’s years and years of battle. My wife and me, she’s also a filmmaker, we finally produced it. We did everything. We put everything into it. We have no credible co-production partner on it, and we just didn’t want to wait for it, and I’m glad we finished it anyway.
Seggen Mikael: You also worked with other archives besides Luce. Were there any difference in how they treated you and how easy it was to get the materials?
HG: If you’ve seen the film, I start with the argument that they are very vicious in the way they commerce those footages. They’re very expensive. And they didn’t even film it. It was soldiers of fascist Italy who filmed most of it. In fact, as one of the few other countries, the Soviets had their own footage done by Soviet camera people. And even those are in the monopoly. They were by the superpower and they’re selling them very expensively. And so to me, Luce is where most of it is archived. All of you know, I’m sure, that the Germans and the Nazis kept very powerful recordings of the historical timeline. But with Luce it has been, like, e-mail back and forth, back and forth, for 30 years and then officials changing. Every time the director of Luce changes, I start from scratch all over again. The other part of it is some of it is also hidden. It might be housed in Stato Maggiore, they call it. The generals, like Graziani, Badoglio, the two prominent fascists who killed the Ethiopians with poison gas and other means, their stuff is housed in Stato Maggiore. I was never able to get in there. And so it was very difficult to really communicate well with Luce. Every time a change comes, then somebody would want to help me. Even now, for example, if you look at the still pictures, they still have watermarks, some of them, from Luce, because they refuse to give me every still photo I requested.
FT: Could you talk a bit about the footage you use?
HG: I’m sure you guys know that Europe recorded its aggression. It recorded its domination and occupation. And that’s one phase of the struggle. One aspect of the struggle is the ownership. Even at the time I began to do this film, I’ve known many Europeans, even American-Italian descendants that were making a film on this history while I’m watching, sitting and hoping to get footages here and there and begging and fighting. And some of the footages we got from, let’s say, French monopoly, British monopoly, they were very expensive. Some of them we couldn’t even afford. That is one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is basically point of view. It’s a colonial point of view. The camera and the lens is pointed with a colonial mindset. And that’s the other battle. The fascist points at you saying, ‘Savage’, now how do you use that image against its original intent? This is about the historical ability of non-European filmmakers – Latin Americans, Asians, Africans – if we were to make a film about that period, we are completely hostages to that domination and monopoly. The battle was not just to colonise Ethiopia, but destroy the history of Ethiopia. Because to colonise the people, you have to demote them first, or at least activate a self-demoting mode in the colonial as subject.
That really is the crux of the film: filming them to tell their side of their story.
FT: Did the film change over the years? Was the epic documentary that will screen at Berlinale always the plan?
HG: As I said after ADWA, I knew that the resources were going to be an issue. The other part is local politics in Ethiopia, and that the guerrilla warfare, the guerrilla fighters who actually defeated the Italians, is a lost history. I know from my father’s book and from my father’s information, how much Ethiopian guerrilla fighters made sure Italian fascism will not be rooted in Ethiopia. As you can see in my film they kept harassing them through the guerrilla warfare, a very traditional knowledge of Ethiopians. I was doing interviews because at that time my father had passed on. I had filmed him only about the dramatic writings he did against fascism, but didn’t really go into history the way I should have gone – it’s a question of resources again. But then I kept filming the fighters that were still alive. For all these years, every time I was doing a film, every time I was in Ethiopia, I was filming. I’ll go look for them in different regions and film them. When I was even shooting TEZA (2008), when the crew rested on weekends, I went looking for the warriors. Is there any living warrior in your area? That’s how I captured those folks. That really is the crux of the film: filming them to tell their side of their story. Because even in the new Ethiopia, after the Haile Selassie government came to power, the guerrilla fighters did not end up with the fruits of their labour. They were displaced. Not only economically, but historically. Their story was minimised. It was not in the school system. None of us growing up after the Italian occupation studied the guerrilla warfare. What we studied was what the British teachers designed, because the British did not leave Ethiopia for a long time, so they designed the school system and they brought teachers from India, Sudan, Egypt. We were actually learning that the British freed us. So it grew into a confrontation with the European perspective, because if you see any documentary on fascism by Americans or by Europeans, Ethiopia is a three to five minute story, when in fact, Ethiopia was the first the casualty of fascism. As I show in the film, the Mussolini generation grew up to punish Ethiopia. Throughout their whole fascist era, Ethiopia was their obsession. Because they said, a Black race cannot go on after what they did with the Italian defeat in 1896. I’m just hoping there would be a Somali kid someday who will make a film, an Ethiopian kid, an Eritrean kid, a Libyan kids. The story is not yet told. Ethiopia was not facing Italian soldiers only. They were facing Somali soldiers, Eritrean soldiers, Libyan soldiers, and so on. This is a very, very serious historical event. But it was so re-evaluated, that we as Ethiopians began to believe somebody freed us.
BW: The people you meet in the film, you speak with in groups. How did you get in touch with them?
HG: Well, in the first place, people know my father. The ones you see knew him. He wrote a book on them. So when they heard I was trying to do a film I asked if they can help me find those that were still alive. Many perished without telling their story to their own children. There were cases where people came from far away when they heard I was filming. Some of them were literally candles burning on both ends, desperately trying to tell their story. If they came in groups, it’s because I would go to interview somebody and they brought the other fighters with them.
SM: You reference your father in the film and in the interview quite a lot and his way of storytelling. Do you want to tell us a bit more about how you used traditional storytelling techniques, the Ethiopian storytelling techniques in the film?
HG: I was never interested at any time in just doing a documentary on the history. I want the folkloric, cultural, spiritual Ethiopians in that period to be also part of the song, part of the structure. And so that aspect comes from my father. My father wrote plays. He wrote epic theatres from the time which I’ve known growing up. I always got little work in his plays. I would say I was lucky to have my grandmother and my father telling me stories as I was growing up. My grandmother more stories, my father more historical stories. All these things are part of my nurturing. Now, in terms of the film, the structure grew to be what it is. To me, I didn’t want to lose the folkloric. To me, Ethiopian history is not just facts. Our history is melody, melodic, sing-song.
And what I quilted can’t be found in any archive. I created a whole narrative, right or wrong, working or not working.
FT: I’m interested in how you built each of these chapters in the editing. The vast amount of footage for an epic film like yours must have been a challenge.
HG: The folkloric interest I have in that straight story weighed itself in the structure as well as in the rhythm of the the story. The way I take the Italian footage, people could have a lot of problems with it, but when I watched it as a whole, I could not believe how I quilted images from all over the place, quilted them to make a narrative of my own. That was the most difficult part. For example in our history there were five or six encounters with this highly military invasion. How do we get the magnitude of the different encounters and the impact it made on Ethiopians and the psychological impact it made on the invaders, the Italians? That’s the very, very important issue that grew for me. Initially, I didn’t know because we only know it as the one wave of aggression that ended in the Battle of Maychew. But collapsing it into one, the whole invasion got bundled up to a point it miniaturised the historical magnitude. I weaved it the way you break up cotton. And as I weaved it, it became formulated into this structure that is there. For example, the guerrilla warfare. At one point, it was lost in the other structure. But I said to myself, ‘No, it has to be told on its own because that history is critical’, so it became chapter four. Or take Emperor Menelik’s monument that has been brought down. I initially only knew one still picture. Some of it later started to come in here and there, but the rest is what I quilted together. And what I quilted can’t be found in any archive. I created a whole narrative, right or wrong, working or not working. I’m not defensive about those things.
BW: How do you yourself relate this big monumental documentary to your fiction films?
HG: I was going to live or die by the structure of the film. I’m not going to compromise it for nobody. I have friends and people in the industry who tell me, if I cut it to this, do that, do that... I’m interested in story. It’s not even facts about this film. I paid attention more to a story. At no time do I go into the dichotomy of documentary and fiction. When I begin a film, it’s ‘once upon a time’. I’m not crazy about facts because I think there are many academicians who could do that. To me, folklore is very important. Storytelling is very important. And also does it have my identity? Does it express my accent, my psychological, my personal accent? These are my interests. To me all my work is drama. You create a drama, you concoct a drama to tell a story. I’m not interested in people telling me length. Tell me if the story is working or not, and throw it out if it doesn’t work. But don’t tell me how a film is going to be, how long it is going to be, or that it’s too long, or this discussion.
BW: I would like to come back to your filmography. ADWA was a co-production with ZDF, the German TV station. And one of the co-producers was Karl Baumgartner, who is also part of the history of Berlinale. Can you speak a little bit about that time or period and how it all came into being?
HG: When I did ADWA with ZDF, the commissioning editor he had assisting him was a young lady, and she was concerned about deadline, they wanted to air it. Eckert Stein was a very progressive producer. He had seen HARVEST: 3000 YEARS (1976) and when I sent him a letter saying that I was trying to do a film on Adwa, he said, ‘With pleasure. I like the film HARVEST, and I’m going to be supporting you.’ And it was a singular, very critical, important part of the making of that film. And then when I was in a meeting at their office, he said, ‘I want your film, I don’t want our film. Our deadline is nothing. You tell me when you are ready to show me.’ That’s how it was made. You see, in Germany, I was able to find an art producer. Usually now more and more Germans have become American producers. But I was lucky to get ‘Baumi’ for TEZA. Karl Baumgartner, I don’t know if you know him, he started Pandora Film. I function better when I find artistic producers, not bureaucratic ones. In what I got from these two, three people, creative people who are interested in the filmmaker making the film as he or she wants to make it and not their idea of what the film should be is a different opportunity. So it was a rare occasion for ADWA. When ADWA happened, I was lucky like hell.
SM: I found it very interesting how your film shows the importance of the war for different groups of people and what it meant and what myths were created about the war. For example, for the Black diaspora, not just for Habeshia people, but for the Black diaspora in general, for the Italians, for the Europeans, and so on. You also show that throughout the Ethiopian population, there are different opinions about how the war was made, and especially also about Haile Selassie.
HG: Well, let me give you the African American view of it, the diaspora part of it. In America, we have to remember, I came colonised into America. You know what I’m saying? I was regimented first, the British educational system, and then by the American. American Peace Corps were our teachers, and we were cultivated to be the English Empire’s students and intellectuals. And so for me, coming to America punctured my illusion. So I have this relationship with Black Americans. They have awakened me because I came in a very dramatic time when Black power, the Black Panther Party, a whole Black liberation struggle, the African independence struggle was going on, and everybody’s citing Ethiopia. I didn’t know my country is that popular. And I didn’t know that Black people went to the streets at the time of the invasion and burned Italian stores in New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh. And so I had all this confusion when I hit America. What awakened me to even the significance of my own father is them. My father was an epic playwright, has his own system, style, his own literature. He did a mobile theatre. I came to Washington, to Chicago, into a theatre school. They were fascinated with traveling theatre that came from Latin America to America during the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement period. Street theatre was becoming big. My father used to do it. I’m saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, my father is something else.’ Knowing not only my father, but I have come from a special country. Even if she’s colonised now, even if she’s confused now, as I am confused, she’s a very interesting country to come from. Why do I have these complexes? To me, that’s part and parcel of it. I was one of the students who was against the emperor, but at the same time, I have grown to see how how he, in his context, made history. I know the royalist. The Ethiopians will not be very happy with that because they would want the movie beginning with him, ending with him. I think that is a misrepresentation of his history, the role he played. He’s a very shrewd statesman.
What I found, I filmed. I didn’t impose on the film my political idea.
SM: Everyone you interview speaks Amharic as far as I think I saw, were you mostly interviewing Amhara people, or did you travel to different regions? How did you select them?
HG: I went to different regions, and most of them didn’t want to... I tried my best. They come from different regions. When I asked in the monastery in Tigray, they answered in Tigrinya. I don’t impose it like people who speak English, I don’t say speak Amharic. I went to regions to find people, but many of the people I was looking for are dead. The Oromo section, that history usually is not known, it’s not amplified by official history. But it’s amazing how many warriors I found, women warriors, the same thing. They’re not in the books that much. What I found, I filmed. I didn’t impose on the film my political idea. I have my politics, but I keep it to myself. I’m not a filmmaker who is in a hurry to make sure politically that the song reflects me. There are things I don’t agree with that are in the film when somebody said something. Sometimes it’s not the way I think the history happened, but if she or he thinks of it like that, I kept it in the film.
BW: Why did you choose to identify the people you talked to only at the end?
HG: When I made a film called the WILMINGTON 10 – U.S.A. 10,000 (1979), I did not identify the speakers until the end of the film. In fact, people liked those credits. They did not know who was a professor, who was not. They found out the ordinary people were history teachers, almost philosophers, etc. If you talk about Los Angeles, Charles Burnett, my whole orientation, my film idea was, ‘I don’t want hierarchy. I want people to come with what they know.’ It’s an idea of democratising the screen. With Hollywood’s simplified narrative, the audience knows it can go to the bathroom or go eat ice cream and come back. They don’t miss nothing. For me, you blink your eye, you miss shit in my film. And that’s what the reality is.
FT: In your film, there is this dichotomy between Black solidarity and European complicity. Did you plan to weave that into your film from the beginning?
HG: I think because I myself became more interested in the Pan-African aspect of the world outlook, I came across Ethiopia as a critical juncture for Pan-African. You’ve heard now in the film the former South African President, Mbeki, the Barbadian Prime Minister. They always feel Adwa is a very critical moment for Pan-Africanism. I’m learning myself about my own country from Pan-Africanists who felt Ethiopia’s war against Italy was critical. Ethiopia and Sudan always had a border conflict. But when Ethiopians defeated the Italians in 1896, for two weeks Sudan danced in support of Ethiopia. If I was reading Langston Hughes’s ‘Good Morning Revolution’, Ethiopia is critical. So this aspect of it grew into the film as a grew into the literature I was reading on Pan-Africanism. In the Pan-African movement, Ethiopians, even those of us who are here now, we don’t associate with the African American community that much because that’s not our orientation. You have to know. When we try to honour those who came to participate in our struggle, we honoured the British. Although the British were like, out of 1,000 British army, the British officers are two or three people. As I said earlier, 5,000 Sikhs have died. There’s not a single monument. My goodness, we even have a Churchill Road in Ethiopia
BW: What could be for you the most important thing that you learned from making your own film?
HG: For me, as a filmmaker, I’ll tell you the truth, I could do another film. I have these scripts. I could do projects in America about crazy things. I’m even now editing another film on the African American runaways from slavery. But this film occupied me, this alone. If my father were alive, he would be proud of this film, because I think for the first time, I detoured into what he painstakingly documented every... If you look at the book, ‘Gondere Begashaw’, I show in the film, he documented every atrocity in his region by name. So if there’s any war crime court one day to happen, my father’s book will be crux, a very critical book. My father’s generation was very disappointed at my generation. Even the change we tried to bring was infected by the absence of this historical legacy. I come from a very dislocated generation. For me, the film primarily locates me. I didn’t consider the size of the film it has become. I grew up with it. It grew up with me. For me, I have overcome a very important therapeutic journey with this film. If it can do that for other people, I’ll be very happy. But primarily it is done. I’m at peace. Once I finish this film, I’m really at peace with myself.
