L.A. Rebellion Pioneer Haile Gerima To Debut ‘Black Lions – Roman Wolves’, His First Feature Film Since 2008, At Berlin Film Festival

Filmmaker Haile Gerima, best known as one of the leading filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion movement, is officially making his return to feature filmmaking with Black Lions – Roman Wolves, a documentary set to screen in competition at this year’s Berlin Film Festival. 

Black Lions – Roman Wolves was announced this morning by the Berlinale as part of the Berlinale Forum lineup. The film’s festival synopsis reads: Decades in the making, Haile Gerima’s sweeping survey of Italy’s brutal colonial legacy in Ethiopia is a monumental reckoning with suppressed history. With a balladeer’s spirit, Gerima forges an epic ballad of resistance, freedom, and national pride. The film is listed as an Ethiopian-American production. 

Gerima’s last feature was 2008’s Teza, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Screenplay award. Since then, many of Gerima’s early films have received renewed attention, with Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing distributing restored versions of Gerima’s Ashes And Embers (1983) and Sankofa (1993). 

Gerima has discussed Black Lions – Roman Wolves over the years, fundraising for the project through his popular Sankofa Video Books & Café in Washington, D.C. The filmmaker is said to have recorded personal accounts of resistance fighters who were first-hand witnesses to the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.

Alongside Black Lions – Roman Wolves, Berlin also announced Volker Koepp’s latest Chronos – Fluss der Zeit (Chronos – Flow of Time) as part of the Berlinale Forum lineup. The film’s festival synopsis reads: Tracing biographical lines, Volker Koepp steps into his oeuvre, rich in encounters. Returning to Lithuania, Moldova, and Czernowitz, he looks back and brings things up to date, as the war against Ukraine becomes a determining element of the present. Epic.

American filmmaker-artist James Benning also returns to the Berlinale with a new project titled Eight Bridges. The film’s official synopsis is a quote attributed to the iconoclastic filmmaker. “It seems to be the time to consider bridges,” the quote reads. 

The 2026 Berlin Film Festival runs from February 12 to 22.