Haile Gerima Quotes

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.

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 compromised to fit into a mold of the Hollywood type.

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

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

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

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

If you never did anything for your own freedom, you're not worth a human being in my view.

To me, entertainment is really the new plantation. It's the new sugar, the new cotton, that black people work for somebody else to be richer than them.

Success is really when you create a space, a piece of art, and people come in and say, that's my story - when they claim it.

You have to have a very strong cash flow for a film to really stay in theaters. You have to have the advertising capacity to sustain and follow the kind of press coverage.

Tarantino is a spoiled little white kid. He can do any movie he wants and nobody can do anything about it.

I really do not care what the white world is doing. I care about black people building the monument on slavery.

You have to be willing to put everything you've got towards the project. That to me is very important. And it may not be part of the fad, being the clichéd kind of film that's going to be successful.

For me, I think [art] exists in a cave. I am in a cave. I have my own editing place, but I'm not powerful enough to amass the resources to keep doing movies every two or three years.

I think once you have films in certain festivals you begin to have name recognition, and there are possibilities.