events beyond my control the money was taken back now the script is finished pre production work has been done my location is cured and there are young people out bring to the location to learn it's not just getting the camera and shooting but also shooting the aura of a people i'm interested in the soul of ethiopians finding and the energy transmitting into people who've come to sit down to look at their story it's a film that most other countries would spend forty million thirty million twenty million at least sixteen million one of the thing we crafted and we're proud of is how we can do with less money a film that could go into international festival and come out with prizes left and right now i want to tell a story about underclass people are they entitled to have an ordinary life and what are the forces that determine the destiny of their love you know this girl for me lives with me all my life she has a piece of me before i left  america i see her i shot her in this image she haunts  this is i not them for me she looks at me yeah you went to america oh yeah you live in america you talk a lot of stuff i remain where i am where you left me that's the the skid so for it life i have in america just very interesting but coming from african country to america through the racism in chicago which was you know intense experience for him and running from that to a and then surviving the racism within that experience and u c l a in the context of a black movement was very defining i think not just for him but clearly for itsel director storyteller and philosoph hundred forty six his early life was centered very much around his large family i'll get him i was one of ten children born to a mother who worked as a teacher and a father whose creativity was expressed through his writing giving the younger team a chance to watch his father's pla film school quickly realizing that africa held little interest for the western film industry though making america his base grima regularly returned to ethiopia to make stories touching on grassroots issues such as exploitation of for laborers black  recognition of his profession the respect of of that he still calls himself a third world independent filmmaker telling him it's good to have some time with you thank you very much for having me pleasure you're a truly independent filmmaker i mean this sense that you're not willing to compromise to to go commercial or or to be handcuffed i guess to the commercial system so who do you make of movies for well it would be very maybe inappropriate to say for myself in the sense that you know i come into motion picture having literally derailed from my on sense of my own historical cultural context and so everything i miss about as i grew older everything i miss is really i make a whole film which is a costly medium for myself but i think we have learned from my first friends in the film is the fact that those people if i am hungered of some subject matter i find a common collective of the african american population like circulation is interesting because you're quite quite straightforward in your viewpoint you say why people are spoiled you know the very very because everybody wants to appease and say as they even when it when a young person or even of any any age person begins to entertain a film idea in the head they start to say well if i get in a white person in the story it becomes more valid movie commercials all the all the trappings whisper to you to bring a white person to pair your characters to be sanctioned by white characters but again this is just the formula hollywood has over the years developed even when they do historical films about gandhi or anybody you have to have white actors that sanction the story and you say white people can be courageous and cross over yeah they can they can are i mean even in my own case you know i have an african american base in america by progressive in a very inquisitive courageous white people cross over to see my movie and i've always interacted without a problem but i think by large there's a whole corrupting implication that has come with the whole idea white supremacy and cultural outputs that i refuse to accept but you say don't make movies to appease black people or black needs on all know even black people have been for me they're the most uncomfortable in my movies but i do not compromise them by making that be let's say releasing whites from the responsibility which often is the case of black filmmakers they will usually as you criticize you critically portray a given black character you appease the white characters for many considerations how frustrating does  get to keep that independence by had to go out there and raise the money i mean you really do have to go out there and scrape it to high do and i don't i don't usually i don't waste my time in the us because i think especially the kind of subject matter is that i'm interested african american and african subject matters do not have that much financing opportunity in america so what i do is go to europe and you know interact and struggle and transaction with european producers it takes me nine to ten years to put together the finance but i am very contented how locked up is the hollywood western film industry how much does it lock out independence like you or very very one you know it's a very dictatorial arrangement even when they talk about i don't know if you know this we usually hollywood not necessarily there's a human being but the mind set they would say to you what's the point of entry when they say what's the point of entry they're saying who's the white character that we need to have enough for these natives to be amplified in that story and that is racist that's the very initial discussion all filmmakers have to go through that who is in it when they say who is in it is really is they're saying who is the who's paring this black this native this arab descent cetera and so it's a very bad arrangement and racist when it comes to like when you're dealing about a race issue it keeps you know holding your story ho and therefore the very objective of wanting to break barriers bring human beings together gets compromised tell me about as early as being one of ten children in kandahar in ethiopia was my my favorite time when i was i  just did a film in the very location i grew up and it was amazing how the the earth itself has changed when i grew up on weekends we lived on wild fruits and now when i was shooting this new film ninety some percent of those wildfires do not exist and so for me it was my happiest time i felt because i was happy that i don't have to be happy anymore in fact i live of the happiness of my childhood that kept energizing me in this so called complicated complex world that continues to increase in the incur into your possibility of happiness being such a big family was it  financial struggle to keep it all together when my father was working with the ministry of education but in a very low budget it's like you may not get everything you may not get new clothes all the time but it's a very happy childhood happy parents my mother actually saved me from really destroy myself because i was the most energetic one how how did your father influence you what sort of character was he is a very quiet guy he didn't brag talk too much he did is was a very is a man of action he wrote a lot for the kind of resource that was available to him you published your book but there are still a lot of manuscripts he left us to publish and he was a good storyteller the whole town and gondor literally admires him and follows them and in a way they go to this honey wine places where they sit down where my father is that's where the people go and to hear humorous  how the early around the fire my grandmother this is pretty electricity in our house my grandmother and her storytelling who's his mother and how much is inherited from her is also an amazing  transaction and so i grew up around storytelling every night all you have is stories you say it's healing as well of very healing and also it exercises you know i would say the negative aspect of your your life because all of us come with good and evil and i think the storytelling is our story puti clee they strip out of your system the evil aspect of being human and they're therapeutic in the end this is really how i itself what made you move across to america to chicago you went to goodman school of drama when you were twenty one yeah and i room this year this is i was i was what you call the kennedy children or eisenhower came a little bit earlier but the kennedy time was the whole idea of america was a larger empire and if you have been educational infrastructure brought a lot of peace corps any therapy in the went to america returns to a privileged status and anything you want to do had you been dunked in american educational degrees you have your better of an ethiopian so there's that kind of cultural environment that obsessively drove me to go to america but you realize once you and you went on to u c l a as well that that you actually you could be a filmmaker not just work in theater because that was your original plan was no oh yeah theater was where i was studying but i really film was accidental i was just standing a little bit i had a an incident with the theater  a and accidently i was standing where students semester and students were screening their projects and as i realized i should try this one it was always my thing with them was accidental the when you went to california i guess you discovered hollywood wasn't really for you know the but by that time i think i have been you know once i got to chicago and racism begin to negate my home my own humanity not only as reflected as the african descendants but even in my own personal life because when i first went to chicago on the outskirts of chicago i did gardening for my financial needs and i have gone through my own personal not as in the way  ican americans or native americans or the chicanos go through but i got my share of confrontation with racism where it negated me because i grew up it was alice less university i was active in the theater department and so here i come to a country that completely omitted my own existence and denied me to be a person even for good storyteller for money how did you manage to finally get that together with must mean a lot of satisfaction when you actually was accent oh yes when it came out as really when i got repaired before you know to do it so much it did cost so much in my own physical and mental state when the film opened and i saw this whole line of black people and progressive white people i was just then decayed and healed in the process but the journey was very difficult because here i embarked  on a subject matter on slavery most in fact liberal very seriously concerned people just thought i was torpedoing paternity to be a good filmmaker engaging myself with the subject matter like slavery but i felt it was something i had to do because i had my own struggle to understand african americans because i came to america twenty one year old having gone to school not knowing anything about slavery and i don't even think african americans came from africa i thought they were just sprouted in in america and so i had to work that out for myself i had to process the implication of slavery and how it resonated in me once you see with the film obviously that was a defining moment for you what are the moments in your life that you feel were very defining in your career well i think this new film again because i thought after sankofa everything will be a piece of cake and then about really the displacement of african intellectuals how we go abroad to bring more than a zation and then in the process things shift so much we get lost and so was there was a critical film to do but i faced so much more problems to raise money for that than even sun cause i took literally fourteen years to finish this film were there any specific mentors in your life my father i would say because that was the first struggle i had is with my father and  to live to him you know and reflect back to see how much is put in me when we were in fact in direct struggle against the road i took and his sense of filmmaker to you know to get the awards to be recognized at at that level at a peer level maybe when i was forty maybe when i was fifty now you wouldn't believe how an interesting it is to me the most thing that matters to me search to find my next move money to my next movie and so it's really i am i've been fortunate even the kind of recognition i have coming from a small town you know i didn't grow up for limelight it's unlike americans for example my classmates friends i know they grew up from limelight they have succession with light i do not have that because i grew up in a very humble circumstances even what i get now i sometimes don't think i deserve it i feel like when i think about my father fraud because he was so impeccable storyteller an epic poem writer and so my standards are really entirely different does the financial struggle to get the films made kill the creativity in any way or hamper it it does affect a great deal you your rust from movie to movie you would for me are this a rhythm because i like to write to direct and also added what i see here is this so important to at least in three years be in a new movie but i'm not like every i don't look at film as pancakes i like to take my time really working over the structure of the rhythm and also my cultural temperament my own accent is not just making the movie i'm interested in my own how my mother my grandmother how they told stories that the cadence of those narratives are important to me is not really even i'm not the content i'm very confident will always be there i don't panic to insert my political or philosophical ideas i but i work hard about if european weavers how they organize color i'm very much interested in basket weaving in my country i want to see church paintings in that how do i then learn from this color tradition to my movies so these are more more important to me you're also very good at giving back and you're a professor of filmmaking at howard university in washington d c what do you get out of it yourself being involved with those young minds well tell you teach university is crazy for are for to teach movies and to university in general across the world is very difficult to teach art to good maybe for chemistry physics etc but for me in spite of the pay in spite of the university problem the usual university academic problem my favorite part of university is the students are my teachers also in every has a tangle with them struggle with them to to help them find their voices i also learn so i become a i am a continuous student this young people this they have so much they could offer for me also they can reenergize me and so my have my favorite part of university students what is the core message there when you're training them when you're teaching them about filmmaking what is the core message you want to impart to them well the core message is good to have something for themselves also not to look at  whether it's moral or entertainment i try to say to them you know what you should find who you are your voice will be unique but if you imitate already existing voices you preempt yourself and so what i try to do my struggle with young people is to say find your voice as you tell the story and that's to cut away the baggage that you think they've inherited from watching your standard how unfair you know you are specially this generation you don't know how they're getting rougher to teach this generation because most of their education comes from television it has even shrunk to their notion of time and space it has affected their visual you know i would say pace in the sense that they're span of attention for visual images and so short they don't even know how to appreciate a lingering shot and show the emotional because they're very multi fast like they're skating through literature not experiencing it as they go i know you see it as the dark side but would you have interest in doing essentially a traditional commercial film well if they came let's say like i'll tell you in those maybe if somebody i say here's money here's a i would never do a movie where they will dictate the the editing for example the structure of the story because it's useless they can find anybody to do it if i join into a project it's because my integrity of structuring the story telling the story does carry my own temperament and this is of course too much to ask you know this is why i don't even have the energy to go but otherwise yeah finance not i'm not into obscene finance but if i got some stories i want to make fifteen ten million five million i would really be very you know overjoyed but the danger with that is also this whole fantasy that has paralyzed a great deal better filmmakers than i living in roaming to find this non existing jackpot and i don't join with that have you set yourself in a long term long term or short or even goals in filmmaking at sixty everything sixty everything is the short term no i you know you wouldn't believe it i live every day like i'm going to live one hundred years why else would i be writing a script last night for example in my hotel room i'm writing rewriting a script that i wrote three years ago rewriting it to you know to see if it can also be you know produced so i would say to you i live like until the last minute of my life i that wants to destroy their individual quality and even in that i'm an imperfect example but that's what i would say hi larry and i thank you very much as a pleasure talking with you thank you very much for having  he's met him when i was like eighteen for the first time outside of a same cofa screening up in vancouver b c and there was a bunch of free standing outside the film screening and i remember he came out and he stepped inside of the cypher and listen to his rap for me and we are kind of shy because hailes like standing in the circle in a he just blessed each and every one of us in a circle and he was like man i just want to germany and i cite each and every one of your faces in the work you're doing is so important and i remember was the first time that i ever met ethiopian person that was like of my parents that was suspected what we were doing