I first saw Sankofa 15 years ago, as part of a college course on the African diaspora. For years after, I would bring it up any chance I got, which wasn’t often, since in all that time, I never met anyone outside of that classroom who had even heard of it. Unlike any number of other forgotten masterpieces, the film was never that hard to track down – you could purchase a VHS or DVD copy with relative ease, and there were versions of it to stream if you knew where to look (the legality of said streams is another matter) – yet, until very recently, it remained largely unknown outside of Black academic/sociopolitical circles (who by no means should be discounted).
Although it earned unanimous acclaim, as well as several awards, during its initial run on the 1993 international festival circuit, Sankofa never received widespread distribution before last September, when Netflix and Array, the distribution company founded by director Ava DuVernay, released a beautiful new 4K restoration of the film on the platform and in a few select theaters. Prior to that, Ethiopian-born director Haile Gerima – who emigrated to the United States in the late 60s and became part of what would come to be known as the LA Rebellion school of black film-makers – self-distributed his movie, booking screenings at indie theaters, bookshops, libraries and colleges.
Despite the academic nature of said distribution (to say nothing of my own introduction to it), watching Sankofa never feels like homework. While it is often as disturbing as you’d expect a film about the African holocaust and chattel slavery to be, its narrative arc is simply too thrilling, its mystical and emotional force too enrapturing, for it to ever devolve into what we today like to call “trauma porn”.
The film begins with a haunting preface, in which Sankofa (Kofi Ghanaba), an African drummer caked head-to-toe in white paint, invokes the “spirit of the dead”, calling upon the ghosts of slavery – “from Brazil to Mississippi … Jamaica … the fields of Cuba … the swamps of Florida … the rice fields of South Carolina … ” – to “possess your bird of passage … rise up … step out and tell your story”.
The movie properly opens in modern day, on a beachside castle off the coast of Ghana. Cast in brilliant white sunlight, we watch as both locals and tourists move about, soaking in this slice of seeming paradise. But underneath the postcard-ready idyll is a history steeped in blood. As we quickly discover, this castle was built as a fortress where the slave ships were loaded and sent off on their journey across the Middle Passage.
It’s within this sacred place we meet Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano), an African American fashion model using the castle as a backdrop for a sexually charged photoshoot alongside her white photographer partner. Their disrespectful presence enrages Sankofa, the “self-appointed guardian of the castle”, so he casts a spell on Mona that puts her in a trance and sends her back in time to the days of slavery. Running through the bowels of the castle, she is beset by the risen phantoms of dozens of captive African men, even as she’s pursued by white slave traders. She cries out that she’s “not African” but to no avail. She’s quickly captured, stripped, branded and shackled in chains.
Suddenly, we’re transported to a plantation in the southern United States. Mona is now Shola, a housekeeper and cook born into slavery (the disjointed nature of this psychic and temporal shift gives the film a Lynchian quality that makes it all the more confounding and compelling). Through Shola’s running narration, we get the lay of the land – the plantation belongs to the cruel Lafayette family, whose patriarch routinely rapes and beats her –and are introduced to the other characters that fill out what from here on out is an ensemble drama. The film takes its time detailing the world of the characters, but it doesn’t focus only on the routine atrocities of slavery. Instead, it gives as much attention to moments of communal joy, kinship and spiritual practice, as well with the individual desires and dreams of its characters.
While Sankofa ends on a note of spiritual regeneration and redemption, at its center beats a heart of dark transcendence, the most riveting of its narrative threads belonging to Joe, whose religious mania, combined with his antagonistic relationship with his mother, mutual but unconsummated lust for a fellow slave and guilt over his daily betrayal of his people drags him into the type of all-consuming madness one expects from a Werner Herzog protagonist. All the while, Sankofa builds to its apocalyptic climax, one of the most cathartic sequences of violent retribution and reckoning ever committed to film.
For as harrowing as it is, Sankofa is also legitimately beautiful, thanks largely to the gorgeous cinematography and bold camera work. It’s difficult to keep from comparing Gerima’s work to that of his peers – the daring formalism and constant breaking of the fourth wall, combined with the omnipresent orchestral jazz score courtesy of David J White, can’t help but make one think of Spike Lee; while the poetic voiceover and breathtaking vision of nature (which the film itself pokes some fun at via a late meta-joke about magic hour lighting) instantly recall Terrence Malick. But given that he’s been directing since the early 70s, he is owed as much credit for originality of style as any of them.
At the time of the film’s release, Sankofa shared more in common with literary works centered on the African Holocaust – particularly those with a magical realist bent, such as Octavia Butler’s similarly themed Kindred and Toni Morrison’s Beloved – than the handsomely produced prestige pictures coming out of Hollywood (or, for that matter, the slavesploitation movies that played the grindhouse circuit during the 1970s). In the decades since, more movies have approached slavery from similarly speculative perspectives, including Jonathan Demme’s flawed but admirably faithful adaptation of Beloved, the wholly misbegotten horror dud Antebellum, and Barry Jenkins’ limited series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. But none have proven as beguiling or haunting as Sankofa.
Now that it’s finally widely available, on the world’s biggest streaming platform no less, the film will likely find the audience it deserves. While it’s frustrating that it’s taken so long, it’s also fitting, given that the word Sankofa, translated from Akan Twi and Fante languages into English, means “to go back and get it.”
Sankofa is available on Netflix
