Haile Gerima, the 75-year-old director of “Bush Mama” and “Ashes and Embers” has proudly operated outside of mainstream Hollywood for almost 50 years.

Filmmaker Haile Gerima is having a long overdue moment and he’s a little conflicted about it.

The 75-year-old director of “Bush Mama” and “Ashes and Embers” has proudly operated outside of mainstream Hollywood for almost 50 years. Now retired and living in Washington D.C., where he taught film at Howard University for decades, Gerima has found himself in a spotlight that he’s unaccustomed to with a 4K restoration of his 1993 epic “ Sankofa ” that’s newly available on Netflix and a retrospective series at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures beginning Oct. 2.

And neither might have happened were it not for Ava DuVernay. Long a student and champion of Gerima’s groundbreaking films, DuVernay spearheaded the restoration of “Sankofa” through her company ARRAY Releasing.

“Mr. Haile Gerima is the reason I was inspired to create my own film distribution company and he is, very simply, one of my heroes,” DuVernay said. “He disrupted the system long before anyone was willing to take notice and continues to chart his own path.