The Left Side of History: On Haile Gerima’s Black Lions—Roman Wolves

Still from Haile Gerima, Black Lions—Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa, 2026.

The Fascist Repression

A scene from Haile Gerima’s great Teza—a film about memory and the traumas of the colonial experience in the Ethiopia of the Derg and Mengistu—stayed with me long after I saw the film at the 2008 Venice Film Festival. A group of children play around a fascist monument that commemorates the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. The monument bears the Italian regime’s canonical iconography, with Latin inscriptions and references to Roman mythology. The monument still exists, though it is now in a state of neglect. It stands on a mountainside outside the town of Gorgora, on the shores of Lake Tana. In the 1930s, the mountain had been dedicated to none other than Mussolini.

Within the film, the scene carries decisive weight: it shows how colonial memory shaped the biography of an entire generation—Gerima’s own, born as he was in the immediate postwar years. Yet for an Italian viewer, the sequence has an additional resonance: it implicitly gestures toward the ways in which the fascist and colonial experience has been repressed in Italy, if not altogether erased.1 Today it is not easy to find monuments in Italy that openly celebrate fascism. The architecture of the ventennio remains visible in many Italian cities, but overtly apologetic monuments are few; and when they have survived, they are often—and rightly so—accompanied by contextualizing devices that historicize their meaning, placing a certain distance between the present and their original intent.

The issue, however, is not the partial disappearance of fascist monuments as such, but the process of repression that accompanies that disappearance—above all, the repression of colonial experience and, more specifically, of the occupation of Ethiopia between 1935 and 1941, one of the most infamous chapters in Italy’s national history. In Italy, a self-exculpatory narrative of the colonial past continues to prevail, and the current government, led by post-fascist Giorgia Meloni, has increasingly contributed to legitimizing this rhetoric in explicit ways. According to this version of events, Italy never possessed a colonial empire comparable to that of Britain or France, nor to those of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, or the Netherlands; its colonial campaigns were limited in duration and, all things considered, marginal, if not even beneficial, given their alleged contribution to the “development” of the occupied territories.

Within this same framework, the Mussolini regime is portrayed as the protagonist of a controversial yet fundamentally well-intentioned patriotic project; the real disaster, so this rhetoric goes, began only with the alliance with Hitler and the racial laws, adopted less out of ideological conviction than to appease the German ally. The reality, however, is radically different, and the Ethiopian occupation demonstrates this with clarity: Italian fascism was structurally an authoritarian and violent regime, permeated by racist and white-supremacist ideologies, as well as being deeply anti-Semitic. It was responsible for crimes that rival those of the worst European fascist and Nazi dictatorships of the 1930s and ’40s.

This is why a monument now hidden on a mountainside outside Gondar—celebrating Italian racial superiority and the supposed benevolence of the colonial enterprise—functions as a symptom. Precisely because it persists in a state of abandonment, it marks the site of what has not been symbolically worked through. It points back to a truth that Italian state ideology continues to disavow: the colonial past is not an episode that has been surpassed, but a repressed kernel that continues to structure the present. The monument does not simply survive; it returns.

It is to Haile Gerima and his cinema that we owe the insistence of that return. His latest film, Black Lions—Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa, stands as the culmination—and perhaps the summa—of a decades-long body of work that has placed the deconstruction of the colonial gaze at the center of its aesthetic project. In doing so, it forces into visibility what Italian historiography and public memory have repeatedly attempted to neutralize: the persistence of colonial violence within the national imaginary.

A Cinematographic Apprenticeship

Before turning to this film, it is necessary to retrace the path that led Gerima to make it, for that trajectory is essential to grasping its significance. Born in Gondar in 1946, Gerima was profoundly shaped by his father, Abba Gerima Tafere, a playwright and epic poet who spent much of his life traveling across Ethiopia staging works devoted to the history of the country’s anti-colonial resistance. His project sought to transform national memory into collective performance, reactivating oral tradition as a living mode of historical transmission. Abba Gerima was also a major historian: his most important work, Gondäre Bägashaw, is a monumental chronicle of the Ethiopian resistance against the Italian fascist occupation, still widely read today and woven into a national epic of patriotic struggle.

Haile initially inherited from his father a passion for theater, which led him to study drama at Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa and, in 1967, to move to Chicago on a scholarship to the Goodman School of Drama. It was only at the UCLA School of Theater Arts, however, that he encountered what might be called the modern epic form: cinema. Los Angeles in the 1970s introduced him not only to cinematic language but also to the wave of political radicalization sweeping American campuses. Experimenting with the guerrilla filmmaking practices of the time—low-budget formats and street locations—Gerima made his earliest works in explicit dialogue with Black radicalism and with a conception of memory and temporality as nonlinear and fragmented, mirroring the subjectivities of that historical moment: the short films Hour Glass and Child of Resistance, followed by the feature-length Bush Mama, shot in Watts and South Central. It was at UCLA that Gerima met Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, and Julie Dash, with whom he helped shape one of the most significant moments in politically engaged African American cinema, later grouped by critic Clyde Taylor under the label “LA Rebellion.” Out of that process of political awakening—alongside his theatrical formation and the oral tradition inherited from his father—Gerima’s distinctive poetics and anti-colonial gaze began to crystallize.

His first “African” film, Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976), marks a decisive turning point in this trajectory. Although it does not directly address the Italian occupation, it is already anti-colonial at the level of form. Shot in Ethiopia, in Amharic, with nonprofessional actors, the film recounts the life of a peasant family oppressed by quasi-feudal relations of exploitation, interweaving the epic slowness of agricultural labor with an austere, anti-spectacular visual style. Gerima’s intention to wrest Africa from the exoticizing and paternalistic gaze of European and American cinema is already unmistakable. In doing so, he rejects the European narrative—even when nominally Marxist—that imagines Ethiopia entering “history” only at the moment of invasion or emancipation from colonial rule. Africa, instead, possesses its own historical and conflictual temporality, as well as a genealogy that precedes and outlives the colonial era.

It is only in the 1990s, however, that Gerima begins to confront Italian colonization directly, and thus, in a sense, to engage more explicitly with his father’s legacy. Beginning with Adwa: An African Victory (1999), and drawing on the immense symbolic weight that the 1896 battle holds in Ethiopian memory and the national imaginary, Gerima inaugurates a reflection, which would extend over more than two decades, on the possible forms of an anti-colonial cinema. With Adwa, he does not merely reconstruct a historical event. He confronts a problem of visibility: How can one restore images to a victory whose documentary traces are scarce, fragmented, or filtered through the colonial gaze? The film responds by weaving together testimony, oral memory, landscapes, bodies, and performance, producing a counter-archive capable of supplementing the gaps left by official history. It is here that Gerima’s project becomes fully explicit: not simply to recount history, but to intervene in the regime of visibility that has long distorted it in favor of the victors.

We, the Black Lions

This long process of excavation reaches its point of arrival in Black Lions—Roman Wolves, which recently premiered at the Berlinale. It is not merely the most ambitious film Gerima has made to date; it is, in a sense, the organic synthesis of his entire career. Within it converge the materials, formal strategies, and recurring obsessions that traverse his filmography: fragments of Adwa: An African Victory (1999), the diasporic “view from below” of Imperfect Journey (1994), the fragmentary and multilayered conception of memory that structures Teza (2008), and the attention to orality—to its circular, reiterative movement—that was already central to Harvest: 3,000 Years (1976).

Yet Black Lions—Roman Wolves is also something more. It is the film in which Gerima’s personal perspective—his paternal inheritance, his childhood in Gondar, the memory transmitted through oral tradition—definitively merges with the collective horizon of the Ethiopian people through an immense, decades-long archival undertaking. What emerges is a form of agency that is neither purely individual nor simply choral, but stratified and mobile. The subject of the film is not presupposed; it comes into being over the course of the work itself, through the montage of voices, testimonies, archival fragments, landscapes, and footage shot across different historical moments. The filmmaker’s “I,” the community’s “we,” and national history intertwine to such a degree that subjectivity becomes the film’s central stake rather than its point of departure.

This is a genuinely monumental work, not only in its duration, which exceeds nine hours, but in the ambition that sustains it: to recount the six years of the Ethiopian war (1935–41) from the standpoint of Ethiopian resistance. Gerima has worked on this project for decades, and the film weaves together heterogeneous materials: interviews recorded across different periods, direct testimonies from surviving protagonists, archival footage, reenactments, performative sequences, and moments of meta-cinematic reflection. The temporal stratification is not merely a consequence of the production process but a deliberate formal choice: time itself becomes the film’s material—sedimented memory and an instrument of counter-narration.

The work is structured in five parts. The Scar of Adwa traces the fascist campaign of occupation, and the symbolic force of Ethiopian resistance, back to the founding myth of the 1896 battle, presented simultaneously as wound and matrix of national identity. Invasion reconstructs the first two years of war, from the 1935 attack to the fall of Addis Ababa in May 1936. Occupation and Terrorism surveys the systematic crimes committed during the occupation: mass killings, concentration camps (such as the Danane camp, whose mortality rate was so high that historians have described it as an outright extermination camp), the systematic use of chemical weapons, and attempts to annihilate Ethiopia’s cultural and religious elites. Guerrilla Warfare restores centrality to the stories of the Arbegnoch, the patriots of the resistance, long marginalized by colonial historiography. Finally, Victory recounts the slow reconquest of the territory, the decisive role of guerrilla groups, and the contribution of the British army, culminating in the liberation of 1941 and the end of Italian occupation.

Within this monumental architecture, the film does not merely “correct” the Italian version of history; it reverses its perspective. The Ethiopian war no longer appears as a minor and ultimately failed episode within an inconsistent imperial project (Italy never achieved full control of the country beyond limited authority in major urban centers), but as a protracted history of resistance, survival, and the reappropriation of sovereignty in the face of a project of racial annihilation. It is precisely in this displacement of the gaze—in the decision to place resistance, rather than invasion, at the center of the narrative—that the film’s anti-colonial project fully realizes itself.

Resistance and the Word

Faced with an experience of viewing that is genuinely overwhelming—one that would require multiple sessions and a thematic segmentation into autonomous blocks (the role of women in the anti-Italian struggle alone would merit a film of its own)—it is worth emphasizing two elements in particular.

First, Gerima undertakes an operation that can be read as the reverse of that performed by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi in another extraordinary film on the Italian occupation of Ethiopia: Pays barbare (2013). Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi work on the archive as writing: they treat the image as a text to be interrogated, slowed down, tinted, refilmed; they even expose its negative, foregrounding its materiality in order to draw out what the official image does not say. In the absence of images produced by the colonized—in the absence of an anti-colonial archive—their strategy consists in reading “between the lines” of the colonial archive, searching for the unconscious of the image, detecting the invisible that inhabits the colonizers’ footage. It is an effort to open up the archive from within, making speak what remains repressed inside it.

Gerima takes a different path. Confronted with the same absence, he does not primarily seek to rewrite the visual archive. Instead, he radically shifts the axis toward orality. Faithful to his father’s legacy and to Ethiopian tradition, he makes the image pass through the word. The image is no longer treated as writing to be deciphered, but as something that must be activated, traversed, and, in a sense, founded through enunciation.

This shift produces at least two decisive consequences. The first concerns form: the film adopts a circular, repetitive, rhythmic movement in which images and sequences return at different points in the narrative, according to a logic reminiscent of the griot and of oral tradition. At the center is no longer the transparency of the document but the voice of the colonized: the testimony, the narration that unfolds in the very act of speaking. Enunciation is immediate, situated, performative.

The second consequence is even more radical. If Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi worked on the image in its near-isolated singularity, Gerima reconfigures it as the expression of a collective performance. For this reason, he makes a choice that in other contexts might have been controversial: the near-elimination of paratexts. We rarely know which archive the images come from, what year they belong to, who is speaking, or the name of the historian or witness. Individual identities are almost dissolved. The effect is not imprecision but a deliberate political and formal decision: the vocal utterance tends toward a collective site of enunciation.

The central problem for Gerima in Black Lions—Roman Wolves is thus the creation of the Ethiopian people as a historical subject. The people is not a preexisting entity but the very stake of the anti-colonial resistance that stretches from Adwa to the expulsion of the Italians in 1941. For such a subject to emerge, the centrality of the individual must be suspended. Singular voices, though still perceptible, are woven into a broader choral fabric; biographies intertwine until they generate a voice that is no longer merely personal. The film thus works toward the construction of a shared voice—not homogenizing, but collective—capable of articulating a common memory where colonialism had sought to fragment it.

The Persistence of the Colonial Archive

The film speaks not only of the past; it addresses the present with equal force. By interweaving interviews conducted thirty years ago, archival fragments from the 1930s, and images shot today, Gerima produces a precise effect: he collapses the colonial question onto the present. There is no reassuring distance. The Ethiopian war appears not as a closed chapter but an open wound, a time that continues to insist within the present. This temporal displacement is not merely a formal device; it is a political position. We are not “beyond” the colonial experience. This is evident not only in the rhetoric of the Italian state under the Meloni government, which continues to treat the occupation of Ethiopia as either a repressed episode or a marginal one, but also in the fact that this experience continues to produce concrete effects today: in symbolic hierarchies, in regimes of representation, in the color line that traverses contemporary Europe.

It is no coincidence that the film opens with an explicit indictment by Gerima of the colonial image archives, and in particular of the archive of the Istituto Luce. Established under fascism as an instrument of propaganda, the Istituto Luce has preserved, and continues to preserve, the vast corpus of images produced by the regime, including those documenting the colonial campaigns in Africa. Those images, including those depicting Ethiopian resistance, remain to this day the property of the colonizers and their institutional heirs.

The question Gerima raises is decisive: How is it possible that the images of anti-colonial struggles remain under the legal and economic control of those who repressed them? How is it possible that access to these images is subject to often prohibitive fees, effectively preventing their reappropriation by the descendants of the resistance? The issue is not merely historiographical or symbolic; it is material. Sovereignty over images remains contested. The struggle, then, is not over; it has shifted onto the terrain of the imaginary and of access to the archive. Processes of repression concern not only the past but the very configuration of the present, extending far beyond the walls of the Istituto Luce in Rome. They manifest in the persistence of racial hierarchies, in the marginalization of migrants, and in the difficulty of fully recognizing the rights of those who come from the very regions Italy once colonized. In this sense, Black Lions—Roman Wolves suggests that the colonial past did not end in 1941 but continues to reverberate in the dispositifs of representation and in the symbolic structures that organize the visible today.

And it is precisely in the imaginary—the privileged site of repression, where historical violence is neutralized, attenuated, or rewritten—that the return of the repressed may also take place. If the imaginary is the space in which a nation constructs its self-absolutions, it is equally the terrain where what has been disavowed can reemerge in symptomatic form. Gerima’s cinema intervenes at this very threshold: not only to expose a concealed past, but to reactivate it in the present, compelling the viewer to confront what continues to insist beneath the surface of images still administered by the very institutions that once produced them.