Med Hondo’s 1979 musical extravaganza West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty is a satirical skewering of the legacy of French imperialism in the West Indies and beyond. From the outset, it defies categorization through its distinct sense of free association as it leaps from one colorful image to the next, often shunning context along the way. Throughout Hondo’s film, the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of haughty, predominately white French aristocrats, bureaucrats, and citizens is combatted, challenged, or lampooned by various African figures. Some are slaves, some are revolutionaries, while some are simply power hungry. The result is a deliriously iconoclastic anti-colonialist work that’s worthy of the finest films from roughly the same period by Ousmane Sembene and Dijbril Diop Mambéty.
Adapted by Hondo and Daniel Boukman from the latter’s novel Les Negriers, West Indies traces an epic history of colonial oppression and enslavement in the West Indies,...
Adapted by Hondo and Daniel Boukman from the latter’s novel Les Negriers, West Indies traces an epic history of colonial oppression and enslavement in the West Indies,...
- 3/17/2024
- by Clayton Dillard
- Slant Magazine
West IndiesOne of the biggest revelations at the 72nd Locarno film festival was a film made 40 years ago. Playing as one of only two African films—the other being Ousmane Sembène’s redoubtable La Noire de…—in a terrific “Black Light” retrospective curated for the festival by American Greg de Cuir Jr.—West Indies (1979), directed by the late Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo has been infamously out of circulation for decades. This despite its landmark status as one of the most important films to ever come out of African cinema.Adapted from a play, Les négriers (The Slavers) by Daniel Boukman and shot in Creole and French, the fate of West Indies was perhaps sealed back in 1979 when it landed on an unsuspecting French public and was received with a shrug. It would take another six years for the film to get an American release. Hondo’s epic, considered as his crowning achievement,...
- 8/30/2019
- MUBI
French-Mauritanian filmmaker Abid Mohamed Medoun Hondo (professionally known as Med Hondo), a founding father of African cinema, died Saturday morning in Paris. He was 82 years old.
Rest as you lived, Med Hondo, in Power. https://t.co/vglzeUn9yX
— Cameron Bailey (@cameron_tiff) March 2, 2019
An award-winning filmmaker who also gained attention in his later years dubbing African-American actors like Eddie Murphy and Morgan Freeman for their movies’ French releases, Hondo remains largely unknown beyond academic and cineaste circles. However, Hondo was a visionary whose work underlined the importance of the preservation of African history via the cinema.
Hondo’s films explored the nature of conflicts within the continent, and between the competing European powers, especially during colonialism. He provided the world with an alternative and necessary understanding of contemporary Africa. He was devoted to creating an African cinema that adopted an anti-imperialist approach to filmmaking, one that could counter Hollywood’s very limited African representation.
Rest as you lived, Med Hondo, in Power. https://t.co/vglzeUn9yX
— Cameron Bailey (@cameron_tiff) March 2, 2019
An award-winning filmmaker who also gained attention in his later years dubbing African-American actors like Eddie Murphy and Morgan Freeman for their movies’ French releases, Hondo remains largely unknown beyond academic and cineaste circles. However, Hondo was a visionary whose work underlined the importance of the preservation of African history via the cinema.
Hondo’s films explored the nature of conflicts within the continent, and between the competing European powers, especially during colonialism. He provided the world with an alternative and necessary understanding of contemporary Africa. He was devoted to creating an African cinema that adopted an anti-imperialist approach to filmmaking, one that could counter Hollywood’s very limited African representation.
- 3/3/2019
- by Tambay Obenson
- Indiewire
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