Bush mama

Born in Ethiopia, Hailé Gerima settled in the United States at the age of 20 to study film at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles). Right from his first film, the medium-length Child of Resistance (1972), he began to explore the precarious reality and social exclusion of black Americans. In Bush Mama, the protagonist, Dorothy, is a young mother living in the Watts ghetto. Pregnant with her second child and her husband incarcerated, she feels compelled to rebel against the system. Gerima’s first feature film, made ten years after the Watts riots, still reflects the reality of a violent and unjust police state. The feeling of police persecution, which Hailé Gerima makes tangible by mobilising the visual, sound and musical resources of cinema. AR