Haile Gerima's sprawling documentary Black Lions – Roman Wolves will screen in its entirety across several days at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, following its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February. The five-part, 10-hour film surveys Italy's brutal colonial legacy in Ethiopia through archival footage and contemporary interviews with eyewitnesses who lived through it.

For Gerima, it is a return to the feature format after a long gap. His previous film, Teza (2008), debuted at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Screenplay award. In the years since, he has kept working from his Sankofa production hub and bookshop in Washington, D.C., a community-rooted base that reflects how he has always operated outside the studio system. He produced Black Lions – Roman Wolves through crowdfunding campaigns and his own cash, a method familiar to those who have followed his career — his 1993 film Sankofa became a touchstone of independent Black cinema through grassroots distribution rather than backing from a major label.

The Berlin Film Festival's official programme lists the film at 531 minutes, co-credited to Gerima and Barbara Wurm, who heads the festival's Forum section — a strand devoted to experimental and socially engaged work. The film screened in that section in February, and the Berlinale subsequently presented Gerima with an honorary Berlinale Camera award for career achievement. The BlackStar guide, which lists the title as Roman Wolves, gives the runtime as 623 minutes and notes scenes drawn from horror films and genre-related gore, suggesting the version travelling to Philadelphia may include material beyond what screened in Berlin.

The film is a 2026 Ethiopia/USA production, presented in Amharic, English and Italian, mixing colour and black-and-white footage with subtitles. According to Deadline's reporting from Berlin, Gerima's next project is already taking shape — a film on the Black Seminoles of North America, the communities descended from enslaved people who found freedom among the Seminole Nation. A Deadline article from March 2021 had earlier described Gerima as producing a documentary on the Maroons of the United States, suggesting this thread of inquiry into resistance and self-determination has been developing for at least five years.

Ava DuVernay's Array Releasing — the distribution arm of DuVernay's Array collective, focused on films by and about people of colour — has previously partnered with Gerima, releasing restored versions of his earlier films Ashes And Embers (1983) and Sankofa (1993). No distributor for Black Lions – Roman Wolves has been announced.

Gerima's standing in international cinema was further recognised in 2021, when the Academy Museum in Los Angeles awarded him its honorary Vantage Award. The BlackStar screenings, spread across multiple days to accommodate the film's extraordinary length, will give audiences a rare chance to sit with a project that has been built, financed and completed entirely on its own terms.