Found in: Afrika Eye
Soleil O: Africa's Lost Classics

Soleil Ô: Africa's Lost Classics

classified 15

Afrika Eye Festival 2017

Film

Please note: This was screened in Nov 2017

Director
Med Hondo
Cast
Robert Liensol, Théo Légitimus, Gabriel Glissant
Details
102 mins, 1970, France | Mauritania

Mauritanian director Med Hondo created this experimental masterpiece in 1969, about a man newly arrived in France. The film details the systematic inequality in labour, housing, and French society overall, but is avant-garde, fast-moving, and at times surreal

In West Africa, black men line up before a white priest for baptism and renaming. In France, colonial blacks, encouraged by propaganda, arrive to seek a better life. What they find is very far from the welcome they were promised. Rather, they face unemployment, blatant racism, bureaucratic indifference, rejection and humiliation. A scathing attack on colonialism, the film is also an exposé of racism and a brutal indictment of Western capitalist values, shockingly just as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.

The film first screened at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and screened again at Cannes in 2017, celebrating its restoration by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation. Soleil O is important for its anti-colonial urgency, and is celebrated as central to the history of African film. This is one of the first chances to view it in the UK.

Followed by a panel discussion.

Curated by Dr Jacqueline Maingard, Reader in Film, University of Bristol

Part of Africa's Lost Classics. With thanks to Glasgow University and AHRC.


Image title


× Close

Help us make our website work better for you

We use Google Analytics to gather information on how our website is used. This information helps us to make changes to our website that improve the usefulness and overall experience for our visitors. If you would like to help us to make continuous improvements to our website, please allow us to set "first-party" cookies (only readable by us) so that we can distinguish visitors and gain greater insights.

Allow cookies for analytics Deny cookies for analytics