WASHINGTON - Among the courses Haile Gerima teaches at Howard University in Washington, D.C., is one called “Film and Social Change.” But for Mr. Gerima, an Ethiopian director and screenwriter who has lived here since the 1970s in what he calls self-exile, that subject is not just an academic concern: it is also what motivates him to make films with African and African-American themes.

His latest, “Teza,” which means “Morning Dew” in the director’s native Amharic, may be Mr. Gerima’s most autobiographical movie yet. It traces the anguished course of an idealistic young intellectual named Anberber from his origins in a small village through his years as a medical student in Europe; his return to Ethiopia, where he ends up a casualty of the Marxist military revolution that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974; and his exile to West Germany, where he became a victim of racism.

“I am from a generation that genuinely wanted a better society and to do something for poor and oppressed people, but which got blinded and lost and turned against its own humanity to become the opposite of what we wanted to be,” Mr. Gerima, 64, said . “For me, this film is really about displacement, which is a theme that really resonates within me.”

Mr. Gerima first arrived in the United States in 1967 to study theater at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago; his Peace Corps teachers in Ethiopia, impressed by his talent, had arranged for his admission there. But he was not prepared for the politics of race in America, and initially felt estranged not just from the whites whose lawns and gardens he tended to support himself, but also from African- Americans.

“I had never been challenged the way African-Americans are in America, and encountering racism shocked me to the point that I had nosebleeds,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be black American, I didn’t want to identify with their situation - I felt they were slaves and I was not. I didn’t believe they came from Africa; I felt they were a different species sprouted from the plantation. The intellectual distance was too great.”

Unhappy with the acting roles he was offered - all the blacks “were just park benches and lamp posts” ? Mr. Gerima transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he quickly won an acting award and developed ties to the Pan-African blackpower movement. He switched to film after being exposed to Latin American directors like Glauber Rocha, Fernando Solanas and Miguel Littin made him realize, he said, that his story was “equally as important and valid” as those he was accustomed to seeing in Hollywood productions.

Mr. Gerima first drew attention in the mid-1970s with “Harvest: 3000 Years,” about an Ethiopian peasant family struggling to survive under feudalism; it was filmed as Haile Selassie’s imperial rule was collapsing. But that film also led to the start of Mr. Gerima’s troubles with the Derg, the Communist military junta that replaced Haile Selassie. The new regime would only allow him to make another movie in his homeland if he agreed to accept what they called their “jurisdiction” over his work.

“When they said that, I couldn’t wait to take the plane out, because I knew my freedom was gone,” Mr. Gerima said.

He describes “Teza” as an impassioned but “imperfect” film. Because financing was difficult to get , it took him more than a decade to complete .

“In ‘Teza,’ he really was able to capture light and shade, the full majesty of the African landscape, which gives the film a tremendous strength and beauty,” said Francoise Pfaff, a Howard University colleague and the author of the book “Twenty-Five Black African Filmmakers” (1988).

“It’s no longer starving Ethiopia,” she added. “It’s a story of displacement and loss that resonates universally, and that also is a relief.”


By LARRY ROHTER