Director's Note

This text is a filmmaker's note from the writer, director, producer, and editor of Teza (2008), Haile Gerima. In full or in part it was circulated to diverse media circles upon the official theatrical release of the film and its wildly successful festival run around the globe. Teza is his eleventh production in a forty-year career in Pan-African cinema. Here, the world-renowned Gerima addresses the cultural origins of his aesthetics and his motivations as a filmmaker in general as well as the symbolic constellations of meaning writ large in the celluloid narrative of Teza in particular.