By Vusi Moloi
I had never been to the AMC theatre on Yong and Dundas. The movie Teza was slotted for 5:30PM on Wednesday September 10 in the great City of downtown Toronto. I arrived here early and perched myself comfortably on the top row seat. Shortly thereafter, a sharp looking African descendent with a touch of sophistication took to the stage. He introduced himself as Mr. Cameron Bailey the Co-Director of the Toronto International Film Festival or TIFF for short.
TIFF is the biggest film festival in North America and ranks only second to Cannes Film Festival in the entire world. It’s truly a great honour to be counted among those attending TIFF. Mr. Bailey thanked everyone that had come and spoke enthusiastically about the award winning movie Teza. The audience became infected with Mr. Bailey’s fervour as he introduced the internationally celebrated Ethiopian film maker of Teza Mr. Haile Gerima.
It was a special privilege to have Mr. Gerima in front of us. He thanked the audience and spoke briefly about Teza. He considered himself an outsider telling stories from the point of view of the outsiders. He expressed a powerful concept that, through the film medium, he had created a territorial space of freedom where he could express himself freely along with his people without interference from the outside. As a corollary, he was able to accept the outcome of such a freedom because any imperfections were his and not somebody else’s to attribute to. As Mr. Gerima was leaving the stage, Mr. Bailey quickly brought him back to say that even though Mr. Gerima was making reference to imperfections in his film, in fact Teza had won five awards at the Venice Film Festival to which the audience responded with a strong round of applause.
The philosophical idea of creating his own space that allowed him the unfettered autonomy or license to fashion his own destiny unimpeded resonated with me. As a published author of A Goodbye To My Little Troubles I have tasted this kind metaphorical freedom and I have since embraced it without letting go.
The highly regarded Mr. Gerima is a Professor of Film Directing and Scripting at the prestigious Howard University of the USA in Washington DC yet his humility is refreshing and only tends to increase his stature.
The lights dimmed and the glorious appearing of Teza on the silver screen arrested our attention. It was a powerful and moving movie. I will not go into details here so that you can go out there and watch Teza. More people need to go out to support African films. In brief this is about a German trained Dr. Anberber who returns to his homeland of Ethiopia in order to serve his people. He finds a different world from the one he had left long ago. This irreconcilable contradiction of his childhood idealism and the harsh realities of modernity under the iron fisted and communist President Mengistu and the war that ravaged a beautiful country came as a stunning shocker. Abeye Tedla who plays Dr. Anberber renders a poignantly brilliant performance along with exceptional performances of other credible actors like Evelyn Arthur Johnson, Veronika Avraham and Aaron Arefe among others. The film underscores the relevant issues of identity crisis and the great struggle for African freedom.
At the end of the film, the director came to the front to join the audience. He was treated to a long standing ovation and most enthusiastic applause I have ever witnessed. It was such a heartfelt moment and a well deserved tribute to Mr. Gerima who has become a legend in his own right. Moreover Mr. Gerima was seemingly humbled by such outpouring of love as he repeatedly bowed solemnly to acknowledge his enamoured audience. He allowed the audience to pose questions and this writer asked about the part of the movie where a mixed heritage boy whose mother (played by Veronika Avraham) is German and his doctor father (played by Aaron Arefe) is Ethiopian. The boy struggles with his harsh experiences of racism while his father is in Ethiopia. The boy wishes for his father to come to Germany to rescue him from the clutches of a Eurocentric society that he finds racially inhospitable. I pointed out that this was a powerful story that resonates with many of us whose children are born in Canada but are not accepted as well as other children of an Anglo Saxon background.
Often these children, from time to time, come home with tears on account of the manner in which they were unfairly treated by some teacher or affronted by their peers at school by reason of their African heritage. I asked him as to what motivated him to include this story.
Mr. Gerima replied that he had met a girl who was crying and she said to him “speak for me” and this motivated him to add this part of the movie story. We met the director outside the theatre to thank him one more time. He was quick to shake my hand and I shall forever cherish this honourable moment with an internationally celebrated Film Director Mr. Haile Gerima and a proud son of the African soil.
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Vusi Moloi is a published author of A Goodbye To My Little Troubles and is also working on a documentary The Eyes of an Exile. A Goodbye To My Little Troubles is previewable online via Google Books.