Harvest: 3000 Years

Mirt Sost Shi Amit

One of the great African films of the 1970s, Haile Gerima’s magnificent account of the inequities of neo-colonial Ethiopia combines a neo-realist approach with experimental techniques.

Introduced by Keith Shiri, film curator and founder/director of Africa at the Pictures

  • Director

    Haile Gerima

  • With

    Kasu Asfaw, Gebru Kasa, Worke Kasa, Melaku Makonen

  • Ethiopia 1976. 142min

  • 35mm

  • English subtitles

Gerima was studying at UCLA when he returned home to Ethiopia, in the aftermath of the overthrow of Haile Selassie, to film this urgent critique. With civil war raging and a military dictatorship on its way, Gerima shot for over two weeks on black-and-white 16mm, with non-actors speaking Amharic, to chronicle the experience of a peasant family that toils under the watchful eye of a lazy, neo-feudal landlord. He shouts orders while sitting under a veranda – the unjustness called out only by the local ‘fool’. But eventually something snaps. Opening in a quasi-documentary style, Gerima gradually brings in a series of radical formal interventions, from editing to sound design, with astonishing impact. The film screens from a 35mm print, blown up from the original 16mm.

James Bell

Access information

A printed transcript of the curator’s introduction to this screening will be available on entry to the screen.