SummaryMona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano) is a Black American fashion model on a photo shoot in Cape Coast, Ghana. Through Mr. Gerima’s imaginative storytelling, she undergoes a journey back in time to a plantation in North America. There she becomes Shola, an enslaved African woman who labors in the master’s house and experiences the horrors of slavery firstha... Read More
Directed By:Haile Gerima
Written By:Haile Gerima
Sankofa
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
93
User score
Mixed or Average
5.5
My Score
Drag or tap to give a rating
Hover and click to give a rating
Top Cast
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
100% Positive
9 Reviews
9 Reviews
0% Mixed
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
100
With this intricate web of personal and family connections, and the brave maneuvering in the face of the overseers’ commands, Gerima is doing nothing less than reconstituting and affirming the full humanity of the enslaved.
100
Sankofa unfolds as a kind of oratorio--the film’s music in itself is incredibly rich and intoxicating--in which people deal with terrible cruelty through ritual and incantations of the African gods. It is a celebration of the strength of black people, in drawing upon their spiritual roots, to defy their oppressors--past and present alike.
100
The focus of [Germina's] story is rebellion and liberation and treating his story as a sombre fable of a soul’s journey through time, he turns the luridly familiar to something poetic and tragic.
100
Gerima’s Sankofa is an invocation not just to African ancestors, but also the present-day viewer. It calls to attention how history exists in the present, how the spirits of the long-gone can still affect today.
80
Sankofa succeeds, on both a personal and a political level, because of the immediacy with which it conveys human suffering.
75
It’s a poetic, mystical and meandering immersion in the life-as-a-slave experience, both for the viewer and for our on-screen surrogate.
70
While there's no doubting the sincerity of writer/director Gerima's film, one can't help sensing more than a little déjà vu in his account of the manifest evils of slavery.
User score
Mixed or Average
52% Positive
13 Ratings
13 Ratings
12% Mixed
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
36% Negative
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
Nov 21, 2024
0
Didn't we do this one before? And frankly, I don't want to see yet another slave narrative unless it's NOT from the Atlantic slave trade. Someone should make a slave narrative about the Middle-East slave trade, which is still going on. Maybe something about slaves taken from Northwest Europe by the Barbary Pirates and sold into slavery in said Middle-East slave trade. It would be refreshing.
Production Company:
- Channel Four Films
- Diproci
- Ghana National Commission on Culture
- Mypheduh Films
- Negod-Gwad Productions
- Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR)
- Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR)
Release Date:May 28, 1993
Duration:2 h 5 m
Tagline:One must return to the past in order to move forward
Website:
Awards
Berlin International Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
