Sankofa

While Mona (Ogunlano), a black American fashion model, cavorts for a (white) photographer during a shoot at a fortress town on the Ghanaian coast, an old drummer, Sankofa (Ghanaba), warns that her actions are sacrilegious to the now- forgotten sufferings of what was once a slaving post, and orders her to return to the past. Miraculously, she is transported back through time to become Shola, house slave on an American sugar plantation, where she is repeatedly abused by her master and where she witnesses the different resistance strategies of her lover Shango and her African-born friend Nunu, who has a power verging on the magical. While there's no doubting the sincerity of writer/director Gerima's film, one can't help sensing more than a little déjà vu in his account of the manifest evils of slavery.