Born in Ethiopia and emigrating to the United States in 1968 to study film, Haile Gerima was influenced by the African-American culture and scholarship. He went on to create films that highlighted the intellectual pantheon of the African Diaspora and the connective tissue of a pan-African heritage--the way philosophers, artists, writers, and political figures of the Diaspora blurred national boundaries to acknowledge the global struggles, victories, and agency of African people. His films tell the stories of African-Americans grappling with the painful past of slavery, Ethiopians confronting racism in West Germany, and the devastating and national and global reverberations of the Vietnam war. Gerima says of his artistic education in the US: "Everything I got every knowledge I have, comes out of African American intellectual property. It's the books, the people I read--that's why my wife and I built this bookstore. This is hundreds of years of Black intellectual production, right here."