Haile Gerima - Independent Distribution and Mypheduh Films Inc.

Independent Distribution and Mypheduh Films Inc.

To gain more independence, Gerima and his wife Sirikiana Aina (who is also a filmmaker) in 1984 established a distribution company: Mypheduh Films Inc., for low-budget, independent films. They relied on this for his film Sankofa (1993).

Though well-established, Gerima, like many independent filmmakers, regrets failing to attract a mainstream audience. "I was never enamored of the film industry," he said to the San Francisco Chronicle. "Every Hollywood story is Eurocentric and if it isn't, then it will simply be disregarded. So I never wanted to be part of an industry that fails to represent the world as it really exists."

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