Comment from The New York Times:; In Sankofa, a contemporary African American woman travels back in time and experiences slavery. Haier Grima's poetic and meticulous film takes the audience into the life and thoughts of the female protagonist, as her moral values are challenged and changed. No audience can avoid the unsettling questions so eloquently raised by the film. The opening shots shot in Ghana are sometimes enticing and sometimes repulsive. In the drums and hymns, a voice awakens the ghosts of ancestors and the souls of the deceased. Get up; The voice said, "And claimed that the title of this movie is a West African term that means to retract the past in order to move forward; Sankofa."; It's just a bit bumpy in depicting the present. Mona is a young model who took her first photo for a cold and ruthless white photographer on the beach. She was dressed in a dress that imitated Tina Turner, with a golden wig on her head. This is a stern way to indicate that she has lost contact with the past, and slavery still shapes her life of being enslaved by contemporary images. But this movie quickly convincingly entered a surreal experience. Mona walked into a dungeon where a slave was transported to the United States. She walked over, where she was stripped naked, chained, and beaten. Suddenly, she arrived at a plantation, a domestic slave named Shola, with no memory of Mona or the 20th century. The longest and best part; Sankofa; It is its description of the daily lives of slaves and witnessing their atrocities change Shola's way. She fell in love with a rebellious field slave who encouraged her to poison her white master. Xiaola refused. Although the owner raped her at will, she believed that killing was wrong, no matter what injustice was done to her. But Shola soon saw a pregnant runaway slave beaten to death, and her living child taken from her body. She worshipped Nunu, a strong mother like slave who joined the rebels. Nunu's son Joe was a master slave, and his life was easier, as if he had turned against his own people. He has blue eyes and is constrained by a white pastor. His story should have been as captivating as Shola's story. But his character is not as convincing, partly because his tormented sense of identity is often depicted by sudden emotional fluctuations and a glimpse of the white Virgin Mary in a church painting. However, Shola (played by Oyafunmike Ogunno with immense power) brought the audience to the core of her experience. When she lifted a machete over a sleeping white supervisor, the movie took the audience to a place where they either killed or didn't kill; Sankofa; Require the audience to enter a different moral world, a world created by slavery. Mr. Gerima is an Ethiopian born filmmaker who has lived in the United States for decades and teaches at Howard University. His films were ambitious in describing slavery and visually successful, from the bright red scarves of rebellious slaves to their setting fires in the fields; Sankofa; Today it opened at the Victoria 5 Theatre in Harlem. Sculpture and provocation, it brought Shola back to the current Mona and allowed the audience to watch with her. With new knowledge from within, she can utilize it as she pleases.