Teza by Haile Gerima (review)

It has been a long time since an African film has to this extent drawn us into the epic. With Teza (2008), Haile Gerima renews the project of his magnificent Harvest: 3000 Years / Mirt Sost Shi Amit, which in 1976 audaciously proffered an unforgettable visual poem that already drew a parallel between the future of the peasantry and of Ethiopia. The opening of Teza is stunning: a puzzle punctuated with chants, a storm, fire, traditional illuminations, veils, memories of childhood, of an accident, all of which are woven together by a fluidly moving camera and powerful music. The entire film is already there, but we don't yet know it: cultural roots, childhood, memory, trauma, exorcism... The flames of the fire are intense: Anberber finally returns to the village to see his mother. He limps and his leg is ridden with accumulated pains, those of a suffering people, torn by political factions that hunt down and capture its children to enlist them. Anberber is a ravaged Ethiopia, but also a disillusioned Gerima seeking a path of hope despite the vicissitudes of the past.

The attempt at historic introspection is on par with the extent of the traumatism. It takes on the air of a confession, the register being that of repentance. This country has followed false prophets; this generation makes politics a religion. Anberber believes he can serve the revolution, but he only reaps frustrations and repression. Violence as the language of the state finds its echo in Europe, in the racism that builds up against Anberber. Gerima dedicates this film jointly to all black people killed because they are black, and to all Ethiopians killed by Ethiopia.

With a few exceptions, the image—very powerful in the Ethiopian sequences, while the German sequences suffer from the hazards of a late and underfunded shoot—is always in movement, to the point of panning before the frame is established so as to heighten the tension. The tight montage randomly juxtaposes different eras to highlight both Anberber's interior turmoil and the country's degeneration. Passionate about his culture, Gerima portrays it with enthusiasm, just as he frequently deploys the beauty of Ethiopia's landscapes. Yet he never lapses into prettified images; the montage is there to keep the spectator alert, forced to piece together the puzzle and seek its meaning.

In his student days in Germany, Anberber becomes politicized. Negus Haile Selassie's fall rekindles his hope of returning to serve his native land. The revolution will separate mixed couples, fathers from their children. His friend, Tesfaye, leaves his son Teodross behind; he will also be subjected to racism and later dream of reuniting with his African heritage.

The authoritarian bent of Mengistu's regime quickly proves tragic. Death lies in wait for any form of deviation. And yet it is his very marginality that guides Anberber's whole trajectory, from the moment his girlfriend Cassandra's radicalism opens his eyes. In the village, he remarries Azanu, ostracized for having killed her own child when her husband took a new wife. Anberber finds himself loving she who has killed, thereby in this respect also marrying the history of his country. He belongs to the people of the village, but he is not from their clan or within their norms: his quest for memory gives him another vision of men and history. Traumatized as much by a racist attack as the murder of children or of his friends, he lives the ensuing doubt in his flesh. It will take ice-cold water and rituals, agreed to out of respect for his mother, to rid him of his demons and to enable him to mount his bicycle to teach the youth. These children who hide away in a cave to escape being kidnapped, and death, are the new generation, which still has a firm enough footing to define a future. It is there too that the child he could not have with Cassandra will be born. It is in...