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-emerge…

- Haile Gerima

The true story is that black people need to tell their history. Very few films are made by black people about slavery. That itself is a crime because…

- Haile Gerima

When the system does not recognize me I'm not devastated.

- Haile Gerima

When you don't work together you can't emerge as a force. It becomes what some call a "lonely struggle" and individual self-destruction.

- Haile Gerima

I think not many young people are willing to pay the price of telling their own story.

- Haile Gerima

For any movement to emerge, it has to be innovatively independent from the mainstream cinema, and I don't see that much.

- Haile Gerima

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 d…

- Haile Gerima

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 compromis…

- Haile Gerima

There's no other way but struggling, forging ahead to do the film.

- Haile Gerima