A testimony to the dignity of the slaves facing colonial subjugation, the film keeps an imaginative visual landscape with complex characters based on the Akan word sankofa - to recover the past in order to understand the present and redetermine the future.


Mona, an african-american model doing a photoshoot in the ruins of a slave-port in Ghana, is suddenly brought back to relive an ancestral past through the invocations of sorcerer Sankofa. Forced into slavery, Mona endures the enforced abuse in the heart of a resilient slave community, determined to survive in an american plantation.

  • Duration: 125
  • Production year: 1993
  • Country: Germany, Burkina Faso, United States of America, Ghana, Russia
  • Subtitles: EN, Subtitles: PT

Berlin Film Festival 1993 – Official Selection in Competition

Haile Gerima

Credits