UpDate - Vol. 14, No. 11, Page 3
November 10, 1994
Producer of underground film to appear at special screening

     A special screening of Sankofa, a film about the horrors of
slavery, and a discussion led by its producer will be presented by the
Cultural Programming Advisory Board at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 30, at
the Cinema Center in the Newark Shopping Center.
     Tickets-which go on sale beginning Tuesday, Nov. 15, at the Bob
Carpenter Center and Perkins Student Center box offices and at
Haneef's Bookstore, 911 North Orange St., Wilmington-are $5 for the
general public and $3 for UD students, faculty and staff with ID.
     Sankofa is about a contemporary fashion model who travels back
through time and becomes a house servant on a sugar plantation, where
she is constantly abused by the slave master. Inspired by an African-
born field hand and his lover, she seeks her freedom and takes her
fate into her own hands.
     Accompanying the film at its Newark screening will be producer
Haile Gerima, who is a professor of film at Howard University. He
struggled for nine years to raise the money to make Sankofa, and then
he had difficulty finding a distributor. Finally, he rented a theatre
in Washington, D.C., and word-of-mouth response kept the film running
for 11 weeks, giving him the money he needed to duplicate it and
distribute it to other cities. Since then, the film has been screened
in Philadelphia, Chicago and Atlanta.
     Time magazine called Sankofa an "electrifying underground hit,"
and quoted Gerima as saying, "Without the support I've had from the
black community, I would have been silenced totally."
     Filmed at former slave castles in Cape Coast, Ghana, the film
takes its title from an Akan word that means "return to the past in
order to go forward."
     The Nov. 30 screening is cosponsored by the Office for
Affirmative Action and Multicultural Programs, the Women's Studies,
Black American Studies and African Studies programs, the Department of
English, the College of Arts and Science and the Xi Omicron chapter of
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
     For more information, contact the Center for Black Culture at
831-2991.