I first saw Sankofa fifteen 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 prior to 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 –…