Consider its final scene: the camera panning over an assemblage of Africans, all colorfully dressed, including Mona, sitting on the steps of the castle, staring out toward the sea. It calls to attention how history exists in the present, how the spirits of the long-gone can still affect today. Gerima’s “Sankofa” is an invocation not just to African ancestors, but also the present-day viewer. It culminates with Shola taking revenge against her abuser. There are rebellions the once warm sunny skies alters to a red-drenched sign of defiance. The soundscape, an eclectic mix of lashing whips, dizzying jazz horns, and woozy spiritual moans, likewise to Mona, is seemingly trapped between whispers of modernity and the booming echoes of the past.Įach character bears their own weight: the plantation’s master routinely sexually assaults Shola Nunu is nearly sold away Noble awakens from his supplicant slumber to grapple with the abuse he’s wrought. It’s all-consuming, wrapping around the landscape and viewer with the warmth of the overwhelming sweat. The sun here isn’t blinding, or on the flip side, inviting. Cinematographer Augustin Cubano gravitates toward golden hour shots.
Gerima loves using dissolves to layer meaning atop of meaning. “Sankofa” is a visually enrapturing movie. Much of the plantation already despised him for being a head slave, but once he begins to regularly attend church, often seeking approval from Father Raphael (Reggie Carter), his mien shifts toward cruelty, eventually believing both Lucy (Mzuri), a slave with a crush on him, and his mother are heathens. The same method of assimilation that stops Shola symbolically short infects Joe too. Shola becomes part of this unit, often signified by their wearing of red scarves on their heads, but is hesitant to become fully initiated, a failing she connects with her Christian upbringing. Rumors also persist of a group of slaves who gather in a cave to plot an overthrow. It’s telling how every slave speaks with a different accent, here, owing to their varied origins, and speaking toward the African diaspora. From her perspective we learn the various slaves who populate the plantation: there’s Shola’s lover, the rebellious West Indian Shango (Mutabaruka) the older, obedient head slave Noble ( Afemo Omilami) Nunu ( Alexandra Duah), who legend says killed a white man just by staring and Nunu’s son Joe ( Nick Medley), a head slave who becomes poisoned by Christianity.Īt its core, “Sankofa” concerns the ways Africans tried to keep their culture during slavery, and the varied methods of assimilation they fought against. “I was raised in the big house with Joe and Lucy, and trained to serve the Lafayettes,” Shola recalls. But Shola has zero memory of who Mona is or was. The next time we see Mona, she’s named Shola and operates as the movie’s narrator. The film takes a jagged, almost illogical turn. Somehow she’s been transported back in time, and, in a distressing scene, is stripped and whipped (thankfully, the violence in “Sankofa” isn’t gratuitously marked by close-ups and happens mostly off-screen).
She tries to escape but is caught by the slave traders who are manning the castle. She descends into a dungeon, finding African men and women silently chained together. The guardian seems to cast a spell on Mona. The guardian also takes umbrage with the hordes of mostly white tourists crawling through the dungeons that once held slaves. 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.Īn older Black man, the self-appointed guardian of this castle, adorned in a white robe and holding a bird-crowned staff, takes great displeasure in Mona who isn’t just using the sacred ground for a photoshoot. During the trans-Atlantic slave trade the castle was the lost stop before Africans confronted the further horror of traveling to America. 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. 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. Instead, Gerima self-distributed the film to independent cinemas across the country, and it’s not been widely seen since then. “Sankofa” didn’t receive distribution upon its initial release.
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