“Bush Mama is fiery, furious, overflowing with rhetoric and slightly out of breath.” New York Times

Bush Mama focuses on Dorothy, the title character, a black woman living on welfare in Watts, trying to raise her daughter while her man is in jail for a crime he didn't commit. Through Dorothy's eyes we experience the turmoil of life in the ghetto-a world of police violence, welfare offices, unemployment lines, decaying tenements, and social workers, where, as Thom Andersen notes, residents are "made to feel they are living in occupied territory." Responses to this oppressive reality range from escapist fantasies and expressions of black self-hate to a growing political awareness. Though scripted and professionally acted, Bush Mama has all the immediacy and urgency of a documentary, capturing the rich, distinctive style of ghetto language, its despair as well as its humor. This was the first feature by the talented Ethiopian-born Haile Gerima, a contemporary of Billy Woodberry and Charles Burnett at UCLA film school who, after graduation, returned to Ethiopia to make the acclaimed Harvest: 3000 Years, and has since made many films on African American life.