Levar Burton has announced that he will direct Initiation, the true story of an African shaman. Burton, who first came to prominence as Kunta Kinte in the 1977 television miniseries phenomenon Roots, served as host for 25 years of the acclaimed PBS series Reading Rainbow and played Geordi La Forge on the hit television show Star Trek: The Next Generation. 

The screenplay by Howard Besserman and Anthony Johnson is based on Malidoma Patrice Some’s autobiographical account, Of Water and the Spirit. Some was kidnapped from his home in Burkina Faso by French Jesuits and trained as a priest. He escaped 15 years later and returned to his people, who were suspicious of the influence the missionaries had on him. Some then underwent a potentially deadly initiation into shamanism that firmly reconnected him to his native culture. Alice Walker called the book “a shimmering ‘missing piece’ in the story of the earth.”

The production is also “in need of a hard-working intern.”  Contact alvinwjobs@yahoo.com for more information.