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When my film went to the Venice Film Festival and won the best script writing, the jury [prize], it didn't go to my head. I know how many black filmmakers that I am operating with whose name will never be mentioned. But I'm part of them in that silent existence.

Haile Gerima

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Haile Gerima
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 4
Film Director
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Haile Gerima
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More quotes by Haile Gerima

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I am not interested only in telling a story, but I want to tell it my way. I don't want my accent, my temperament, my narrative style to be compromised to fit into a mold of the Hollywood type.
Haile Gerima
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Most young people make films to be accepted, to be discovered, when in fact that was the last idea with the group I went to film school with. To be discovered was not our intention. Our intention was to tell our story our way, and make our own mistakes and learn from film to film.
Haile Gerima
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There's no other way but struggling, forging ahead to do the film.
Haile Gerima
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Most young people now are very vulnerable as to what the American film aficionados are going to say. They care too much about a system that has no room for them. It's really a serious issue for me, because to me it's, how do I survive beyond a film that was disgraced or praised?
Haile Gerima
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When the system does not recognize me I'm not devastated.
Haile Gerima
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For any movement to emerge, it has to be innovatively independent from the mainstream cinema, and I don't see that much.
Haile Gerima
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To me, entertainment is really the new plantation. It's the new sugar, the new cotton, that black people work for somebody else to be richer than them.
Haile Gerima
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Tarantino is a spoiled little white kid. He can do any movie he wants and nobody can do anything about it.
Haile Gerima
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I really do not care what the white world is doing. I care about black people building the monument on slavery.
Haile Gerima
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You have to keep yourself busy, you have to like the subject matter. If you do it for other causes, other reasons, it doesn't hold you for a long time. There's no other way but struggling, forging ahead to do the film.
Haile Gerima
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A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.
Haile Gerima
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I'm organizing documentary films, and whenever scriptwriting gets too tedious I go to my editing room and start to edit the documentary, even if I don't have the full funding yet. So you have to keep yourself busy, you have to like the subject matter.
Haile Gerima
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There has to be consistent emergence of two or three films - narratively, stylistically, consistently demonstrating you are here to go on. And on that kind of basis, I'm not seeing much. I'm just waiting to see.
Haile Gerima
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The system knows how to cherry pick black people. It's like affirmative action - once a year, one is recognized. But what has to occur is self-emergence so if they ignore you, you don't have to disappear.
Haile Gerima
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To me the industry has always said that the lovers and haters and principal characters will always be white in Hollywood, and black people will always be appendages of those kinds of dramas, or they will be comedic outlets. It will never change.
Haile Gerima
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If you never did anything for your own freedom, you're not worth a human being in my view.
Haile Gerima