“As for Ethiopia… we have been patient for 40 years. This is enough.”
When Benito Mussolini uttered those words to a roaring crowd in Rome, he was not merely delivering a speech. He was announcing a war—one that would test the limits of fascist expansion and ignite one of Africa’s most enduring symbols of resistance.
The declaration came decades after European powers had formalized the late-19th-century “Scramble for Africa,” the colonial project that divided much of the continent among imperial powers.
Yet Mussolini’s imperial ambitions would collide with one of Africa’s most consequential acts of resistance. In Adwa, in what is now Ethiopia’s Tigray region, Ethiopian forces—later immortalized as the “Black Lions”—defeated invading Italian troops, preserving the country’s sovereignty and delivering a historic rebuke to European colonial expansion.
130 years later, the legacy of that resistance has returned to the global stage. At the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, held from February 12 to 22, 2026, audiences were introduced to Black Lions, Roman Wolves: The Children of Adwa, a sweeping documentary by the Ethiopian historian and filmmaker Haile Gerima (Prof.).
Running nearly nine hours, the film is both an expansive historical excavation and a meditation on memory, myth and resistance. It revisits Italy’s colonial ambitions in Ethiopia and situates the country’s struggle within the broader history of fascism and African anti-colonial movements.
At the center of the documentary is Ethiopia’s arduous fight against fascist Italy during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935 to 1941. The project, which took Haile more than three decades to complete, traces the resilience of Ethiopian patriots who waged a protracted resistance against occupation before ultimately reclaiming their independence.
Told through a distinctly African perspective, the film foregrounds the stories of Ethiopian men and women who resisted fascist rule. Haile also confronts one of the least examined aspects of the war: Italy’s use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia, a series of war crimes that remain largely absent from many Western narratives of World War II.
The documentary draws on a vast archive of material, weaving together oral histories and testimonies from more than 200 Ethiopian veterans and witnesses. Haile also incorporates archival footage from Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Russia, assembling a transnational historical record to reconstruct Ethiopia’s wartime experience.
Structured as a five-part cinematic epic, Black Lions, Roman Wolves chronicles both the brutality of fascist occupation and the enduring spirit of resistance that followed. In recognition of the project’s significance, the Berlin festival awarded Haile the Berlinale Camera on February 17, honoring his lifetime contribution to cinema and the film’s world premiere.
Haile’s path to filmmaking began decades earlier. In 1967, the Ethiopian-born director moved to the United States to study at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he became a leading figure in the L.A. Rebellion—a generation of African and African American filmmakers who, beginning in the 1970s, sought to create an independent Black cinema that challenged Hollywood’s dominant narratives.
Across a career spanning more than a dozen films, Haile has consistently fused personal memory with historical and political inquiry. His work is marked by counter-narrative storytelling and a distinctly Pan-African sensibility. Scholars often cite his landmark film Sankofa as emblematic of this approach, noting how it confronts the legacies of slavery and resistance while centering African cultural perspectives.
With Black Lions, Roman Wolves, Haile’s lifelong artistic mission takes on a deeply personal dimension. Driven by memories of war and the urgency of preserving fading testimonies, he spent decades documenting the Ethiopian patriots who resisted Mussolini’s forces. Determined to retain full creative control, he financed the film largely on his own.
Yet for many observers, the project is more than an ambitious documentary. It is also a battle over historical memory—an effort to reclaim ownership of a story that has often been overlooked, minimized or told through the lens of others.
Early previews of the footage have drawn enthusiastic responses, particularly among African American and Ethiopian diaspora audiences. Many viewers have pointed to the film’s deep historical and cultural resonance, describing it as a rare cinematic preservation of a shared heritage. For some, it offers an uncommon portrayal of an unequivocal African victory over European colonial forces. For others, it raises provocative questions about historical memory, suggesting that the descendants of Italian soldiers have, in different ways, returned to Ethiopia still grappling with the legacy of a defeat suffered generations ago.
Others see Black Lions, Roman Wolves as something more reflective: a meditation on histories shaped by oppression, resistance and the unfinished work of decolonization. In that sense, the film’s themes resonate well beyond Ethiopia, echoing broader global conversations about how nations confront the violence embedded in their past.
For Haile, however, the documentary represents something far more personal. He describes the project as the culmination of a life lived within what he calls an “environmental sing-song” of resistance.
Haile grew up in a household steeped in the memory of war. His father was a playwright who documented colonial atrocities, while his mother was orphaned during the Italian occupation. The filmmaker has described the documentary as a final spiritual union with his father’s legacy. One of his father’s works, Yewatit Gishit, served as what Haile calls a “dictionary” for the film — a painstaking record of Ethiopian lives lost during the occupation.
That personal connection transforms the documentary from a historical chronicle into something more intimate: an act of what Haile calls “counter-storytelling,” aimed at challenging what he describes as the “miseducation” surrounding the war — not only in Western narratives but also among Ethiopian and Italian audiences.
The road to the film’s world premiere was itself arduous. For nearly two decades, Haile fought to gain access to colonial archives, particularly those controlled by the Italian institution Luce. He describes the process as both bureaucratically exhausting and emotionally draining.
“I was fighting bureaucracy and guilt at the same time,” he said, reflecting on the struggle to obtain archival footage. “It took so much from me as a human being.”
Beyond the archives, the documentary also confronts the psychological weight of history. Haile has said that even his own generation once struggled to fully believe the magnitude of Ethiopia’s victory at Adwa, having grown up under the influence of Western-centered historical narratives.
By weaving together oral histories from more than 200 Ethiopian veterans and witnesses, and by drawing on the cultural folklore surrounding resistance, the film attempts to construct a counter-narrative to the silence that has long surrounded the war — including Italy’s use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia.
For Gerima, completing the project represents both a personal reckoning and a national reflection.
He hopes the film will encourage viewers — particularly in a modern Ethiopia grappling with internal divisions — to question the narratives they have inherited.
“I grew in the film more than anybody would get out of it,” he said during a recent media discussion about the documentary’s three-decade journey. “I learned more about my mother, my father and my country.”
To further illuminate the intellectual depth of Haile’s cinematic legacy, scholars and critics have spent decades examining the layers of what he calls “counter-storytelling.”
Among those who have closely studied his work is Tekletsadik Belachew, a researcher and author of The Dead Speaking to the Living and Stories from the Fireplace. In an interview with The Reporter, Tekletsadik said Haile’s films operate at the intersection of regional identity and global Black liberation.
Even when his stories are rooted in the Ethiopian highlands, Tekletsadik noted, they resonate far beyond national borders.
“Most of his films revolve around the history and experience of people of African descent,” Tekletsadik said. “Even when they are specifically about Ethiopia, they always carry a Pan-African flavor.”
According to Tekletsadik, Haile’s work is defined by a deliberate effort to reclaim narratives long distorted by colonial historiography. Whether directing in Amharic or English, the filmmaker maintains a consistent perspective that centers African voices and experiences.
That thematic continuity, the scholar argues, runs throughout Haile’s body of work—from early films such as Harvest: 3000 Years to the internationally acclaimed Sankofa—and reaches its most expansive form in Black Lions, Roman Wolves.
One of the key insights from Tekletsadik’s research is Haile’s dual role as both filmmaker and historian, a distinction that the scholar says is often overlooked in mainstream criticism.
In that sense, Black Lions, Roman Wolves functions not only as a cinematic project but also as a therapeutic archive for a nation that, Tekletsadik argues, has often been “miseducated” about its own history of triumph and trauma.
By documenting the testimonies of more than 200 Ethiopian patriots, Haile constructs what the researcher describes as a vital historical window—one that allows younger generations to encounter the lived realities of resistance.
“Regarding memory, it has a lot of benefits,” Tekletsadik said. “Thinking about what happened to us and what we became—whether the past was good or bad—has a therapeutic effect.”
For him, the documentary is more than a historical retelling. It is, as he describes it, a form of “holy water,” intended to preserve memory while helping a nation confront its past.
In that sense, Black Lions, Roman Wolves stands as more than an ambitious film project. It is an act of cultural preservation, safeguarding the fading voices of Ethiopia’s wartime defenders and reclaiming the narrative of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War from the margins of colonial archives.
