Med Hondo

Director

May 4, 1935 (83 years)

† March 2, 2019

Ain Beni Mathar, Maroc

Biography

Med Hondo was a Mauritanian film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and voice actor. He emigrated to France in 1959 and began to work in film during the 1960s. He received critical acclaim for his 1967 directorial début Soleil O. Son vrai nom est Mohamed Abid né le samedi 4 mai 1935, à Ain Beni Mathar au Maroc et décédé le samedi 2 mars 2019 à l'âge de 83 ans au 14ème arrondissement de Paris.

Filmography

6.8

Soleil O

An educated native of Mauritania tries to find work in Paris but encounters difficulty because of his race.

7.0

Black Light

When a man's best friend is shot in cold blood by two corrupt policemen, he must track down the only eyewitnesses, who have deported to Mali.

6.8

Sarraounia

On 2 January 1899, starting from the French Sudan, a French column under the command of the captains Voulet and Chanoine is sent against the black Sultan Rabah in what is now the Cameroon. Those captains and their African mercenary troops destroy and kill everything they find on their path. The French authorities try to stop them sending orders and a second troop but the captains kill the emissaries who reach them. Sarraounia, queen of the Aznas, have heard about the exactions. Clever in war tactics and in witchcraft, she decides to resist and stop those mad men.

6.5

West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty

Aboard a giant slave ship in an abandoned Citroën factory, the history of the West Indies is traced through several centuries of French oppression. The ship becomes a stage for the people to tell stories via song and dance—from their enslavement to their displacement in Metropolitan France.

N/A

My Neighbours

African migrants in Paris talk about everyday life and racism on the labour and housing markets. The chanson from which the film takes its title sings of misery on people’s own doorstep. Hondo then switches to another mode to continue his analysis of social conditions: never has the post-colonial state of the world been summarised as succinctly as in the closing animated sequence.

N/A

Polisario, a people in arms

This film is a testimony. These are the images and sounds recorded throughout the area of struggle of the Saharawi people and they testify to their will to live free at home while placing the "Sahroui problem" in a real context. Ex-Spanish colony whose wealth is considerable, Western Sahara should, like many African countries, gain independence according to United Nations resolutions.

N/A

Fatima, the Algerian Woman of Dakar

In the aftermath of the Algerian War, a young Algerian woman reaches a strange reconciliation with the Senegalese officer who raped and impregnated her.

9.0

We shall have the whole of death to sleep

Documentary filmed over a period of four months, from 25 December 1975 to 5 March 1976, in the area of the former Spanish Sahara claimed by the people who lived there, the Saharawis, a people now mobilised and in arms (the Polisario Front) against Morocco and Mauritania, two states that have signed an agreement to share the territory.

6.7

The Black Wogs, Your Neighbors

A lucid, sincere and intricate political film, it demonstrates how French neocolonialism exploits migrant labor and exerts a cultural imperialism over their minds.

8.0

Watani: A World Without Evil

Two men of different backgrounds lose their respective jobs, setting off a series of events that brings them together in tragic circumstances.

7.0

Hunger Of The World

A documentary that critiques the neo-colonial destruction of indigenous African agriculture and economies, resulting in mass starvation.

N/A

Ballade aux sources

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 “restoration in progress” without sound, introduced by Annabelle Aventurin (cine-archives).

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