Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
MED HONDO
March 22 – April 2
March 22 - April 2, 2024
Med Hondo was one of the most artistically innovative, politically engaged, and theoretically astute of the radical auteurs who reinvented narrative cinema in the 1960s and 70s, and a towering figure among the early generations of post-colonial African filmmakers. Born in Morocco and raised in Mauritania, Hondo migrated to France in 1956, where he was based for the rest of his life (he passed away in 2019 at the age of 82). In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Hondo played a crucial role within the French theater, performing in a wide variety of classic and contemporary plays, and co-founding with Robert Liensol his own theater company (Shango) in 1966, which focused on Black playwrights. Later in his life, he worked extensively as an actor, and a voice actor (he famously gave voice to actors such as Danny Glover, Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Muhammad Ali, and Eddie Murphy, when their films were dubbed into French). But it’s his own films that stand as his greatest achievement.
Hondo’s first feature, SOLEIL Ô (1970), immediately established him as an artist working at the forefront of a politically and aesthetically vanguard cinema. It remains his best-known film, and a landmark work, but the features that followed were no less vital, fearless, and inspired, and were in some cases even more ambitious. The totality of his oeuvre has been greatly neglected thus far, but that has begun to change, thanks in part to a number of tributes around the world following his death (including at the Harvard Film Archive and the Viennale in 2023), and to the week-long revival run of his 1979 anti-colonial musical extravaganza WEST INDIES at Film Forum in March. In conjunction with that engagement, Anthology is honored to host this retrospective, which includes the majority of his feature films as well as two shorter works.
“I have always strived for a cinema of rupture, because I consider that Africans, African civilizations, Black people have their own history, their own destiny, their own expression, and that the cinema they make cannot be the classic cinema made by everybody else, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, kisses, feelings, love, etc. I did not want to swim in that pond. I always told my colleagues to make sure not to imitate the Other cinema. They could of course be inspired by it, by many of its qualities, but not mimic it. For me, the dogma, if any, was to never imitate…” –Med Hondo, interview with Aboubakar Sanogo
“Throughout his career, his films and beyond, Med Hondo sought to actualize this vision in his choice of emancipatory themes, a radically and formally innovative approach, an uncompromising and critical bidirectional gaze, and in his contributions to the creation and/or nurturing of important African cinematic institutions such as the Pan African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO), the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) and the Comité Africain des Cinéastes (CAC). […] At once sober and exuberant, mixing pure and spectacular virtuosity with surprising and sometimes minimalist restraint, Hondo’s is a cinephile’s cinema, not of the navel-gazing and thumb-sucking kind…but rather a cinephilia premised on the inseparability of the aesthetic and the political. Humorous, caustic, thought-provoking, historically conscious, uncompromising yet profoundly empathetic and restlessly innovative in their mise en scène, montage, sound design and narrativization, the indocile films of Med Hondo invite us to take our destinies in our own hands and forge a world in our own image.” –Aboubakar Sanogo, Carleton University
This retrospective has been organized in collaboration with Aboubakar Sanogo, Associate Professor in Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Sanogo’s writings have appeared in Framework, Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, Film Comment, and elsewhere, and he is currently completing two manuscripts on the history of documentary in Africa and on the cinema of Med Hondo, and an anthology on the legendary director.
Sanogo will be here at Anthology in person to introduce the Tuesday, March 26 screening of SOLEIL Ô and the Wednesday, March 27 screening of BLACK LIGHT.
Special thanks to Zahra Hondo; Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University); Haden Guest & Mark Johnson (Harvard Film Archive); Brian Belovarac & Emily Woodburne (Janus Films); Bruce Goldstein (Film Forum); and Federico Lancialonga (Ciné-Archives).
For more info about WEST INDIES, which will be screening at Film Forum starting on March 22, visit filmforum.org
SOLEIL Ô
1970, 102 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French and Arabic with English subtitles.
“SOLEIL Ô is Med Hondo’s first feature and earned him the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival in 1970, instantly securing his place as one of the giants of African and world cinema. A loosely constructed narrative of the travails of an accountant confidently arriving in Paris to pursue his dreams, the film meticulously uncovers the challenges he faces, including racial, housing and employment discrimination along with sexual objectification. For Med Hondo, filming the migrant condition entails going beyond consequences and using caustic humor and imagination to analyze causalities (which include colonialism, the structures of capitalism and the implications of neocolonialism) in order to effect change. SOLEIL Ô remains as perceptive, timely and relevant in the 21st century as it was at the time of its release five decades ago.” –Aboubakar Sanogo
Fri, Mar 22 at 7:00, Tues, Mar 26 at 8:45, and Sun, Mar 31 at 6:00.
Med Hondo & Bernard Nantet
BALLADE AUX SOURCES [work print]
1965, 31 min, 16mm-to-DCP. No dialogue. Collection Ciné-Archives.
“BALLADE AUX SOURCES, Med Hondo’s first film, is a documentary about the journey of an African emigrant through his native land shortly after the independence of North Africa. This film allows us to glimpse the themes that are dear to Med Hondo: pan-Africanism and pre-colonial African history. It is presented as a ‘restoration in progress’ without sound.” –Annabelle Aventurin
MY NEIGHBOURS / MES VOISINS
1971, 35 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Collection Ciné-Archives.
“MES VOISINS is in many ways a child of the cinéma vérité debates of the early 1960s, which foregrounded the use of synchronized sound and lightweight cameras to represent the real. The possibility of approaching the migrants and capturing their testimonies was predicated on that technology. As Hondo was a virulent critic of Jean Rouch, it is ironic that MES VOISINS embodied some of his techniques, such as the concept of the interactive camera, the foregrounding of the interview, and the notion that observation alone is not enough.” –Aboubakar Sanogo
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Sat, Mar 23 at 6:00, Tues, Mar 26 at 6:45, and Tues, April 2 at 9:00.
POLISARIO, A PEOPLE IN ARMS / POLISARIO, UN PEUPLE EN ARMES
1978, 85 min, 16mm. In French with projected English subtitles.
“POLISARIO, UN PEUPLE EN ARMES, a documentary made for TV co-produced with Algerian television is Med Hondo’s second film devoted to his support for the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination in Western Sahara. Shot in one of the rare former Spanish colonies in Africa, the film chronicles a last clash between Morocco (that has occupied much of the Western Sahara after Spain ended its colonial rule in 1975) and the Polisario (The Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro) before the signing of a ceasefire. Relying more on images than words, the film foregrounds actual battle scenes in which the crew found themselves in this context of armed struggle of a people sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical interests.” –Aboubakar Sanogo
Sat, Mar 23 at 8:15 and Wed, Mar 27 at 6:15.
SARRAOUNIA
1986, 120 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In Dyula, Peul, and French with English subtitles.
“SARRAOUNIA is a rare species of film in the history of African cinema. Although numerous projects existed that sought to celebrate African resistance to European colonial conquest, African cinema’s dependence on the political economy of its former colonizers has for the most part made this aspiration nearly impossible. The film owes much of its existence to Thomas Sankara, the former head of state of Burkina Faso who, upon learning of Hondo’s difficulties in Niger, offered to let him shoot the film in Burkino Faso and put technicians, actors and the Burkinabe army at his disposal. By adapting Abdoulaye Mamani’s eponymous book, Hondo chose to make an epic of one page of the great encyclopedia of African resistance against colonialism. Following the notorious 1884-85 Berlin conference, European countries engaged in a collective assault on the African continent in order to take over its lands and resources, thereby inaugurating the age of catastrophe. Headed for Lake Chad in Central Africa, the infamous and bloodthirsty Voulet Chanoine French military expedition, which is seeking to enact a French version of the British Cape-to-Cairo imperial fantasy, crosses paths with the indomitable and incomparable strategist Queen Sarraounia of the Azna, who bravely resists their incursion.” –Aboubakar Sanogo
Sun, Mar 24 at 5:00, Thurs, Mar 28 at 7:00, and Mon, April 1 at 7:00.
BLACK LIGHT / LUMIÈRE NOIRE
1994, 103 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French with English subtitles. Collection Ciné-Archives.
“The film tells the story of a police blunder at a roadblock near Charles de Gaulle airport following a terrorist alert. A motorist is killed in the process. His friend, an aircraft engineer, does not believe the police account of the incident. The only way for him to uncover the truth is to find the only eyewitness to the killing, a young Malian held in a hotel at the airport and waiting to be deported along with one hundred other migrants. The aircraft engineer’s quest leads him all the way to Bamako and eventually the Malian countryside. Unlike his other films, Med Hondo experiments with the crime thriller here (tipping his hat in the process to Orson Welles’ mythic opening sequence of TOUCH OF EVIL) to explore the reality of the deportation of African migrants back to their countries of origin. In the pure guerilla filmmaking tradition, the director and his crew illegally shot some of the scenes at the Paris airport, in part by disguising themselves as airport workers. Only the direct intervention of French President François Mitterand himself helped the situation. With LUMIÈRE NOIRE, Hondo explores the ways in which the supposedly ‘post’-imperial state turns on its own citizens and devours them in situations of crisis, where, as aptly put in the film’s one-liner, ‘democracy stops where State reason begins.’” –Aboubakar Sanogo
Sun, Mar 24 at 8:00 and Wed, Mar 27 at 8:30.
WATANI / WATANI, UN MONDE SANS MAL
1998, 78 min, 35mm. In French with English subtitles.
“Shot in black and white on a shoestring budget in a minimalist mode and with winks toward silent cinema and hip hop culture, WATANI was inspired by news of the daily humiliation of migrants and a general context of fear. The film contrasts the lives of two characters who lose their job the same day: Patrick Clement, a married bank clerk with two daughters and a wife now in a wheelchair following a terrorist attack, and Mamadou Sylla, an African immigrant and a father of two, who is a garbage collector. While the latter seeks employment in vain, the former drifts slowly into the hands of extremist right wing groups who attack and kill black and Arab migrants in the dark of the night. Symbolically rich, the film has important resonances with the longer history of France’s relationship to its former colonies, namely the famous October 17, 1961 massacre of Algerian migrants in Paris directed by the then police chief himself in reprisal against the FLN’s independence struggle. In this film, Hondo de-emphasizes speech and stresses the cine-discursive potential of the articulation of sound and image tracks, making this a genuine montage film and leaving it up to the spectator to make the necessary connections.” –Aboubakar Sanogo
Mon, Mar 25 at 6:30, Sun, Mar 31 at 8:30, and Tues, April 2 at 6:30.
FATIMA, THE ALGERIAN WOMAN OF DAKAR / FATIMA, L’ALGÉRIENNE DE DAKAR
2004, 93 min, 35mm-to-DCP. In French, Arabic, and Wolof with English subtitles. Collection Ciné-Archives.
“Exploring the legacies of decolonization and functioning as a testimony to the director’s profound investment in the historical, the film tells the story of Fatima, an Algerian woman who is raped during her country’s liberation war in 1957 by Souleymane Fall, a young Senegalese officer heading a column of the occupying French colonial army. A few years after his return to Senegal, Souleymane is summoned by his father and ordered to go back to Algeria to repair the harm he caused Fatima, who has been the object of unspeakable racism for carrying a black son. Souleymane, Fatima and their son Abdelkader ultimately return to Senegal to start a new life potentially full of promise. As a brilliant hymn to the pan-African project and a beautiful tribute to the figure of Frantz Fanon, FATIMA could also be looked at in terms of Hondo’s attempt at a political cinema aimed at creating what Deleuze refers to as a “people to come” (un peuple à venir). By bringing Fatima, the Algerian woman, to Dakar by way of cinema, Hondo does in effect partake in literally forging a pan-African people, a people that would emerge from the bringing together of the cultures for the production of a new Africa. Such is Med Hondo’s ultimate message in what ended up being his testament film.” –Aboubakar Sanogo
Mon, Mar 25 at 9:00 and Sun, Mar 31 at 3:45.
