IN CINEMA

Wednesday, July 16, 2025 at 7PM
Fanon @100

Med Hondo’s WEST INDIES: FUGITIVE SLAVES of LIBERTY

Med Hondo, 1979, 116 minutes

Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s WEST INDIES: FUGITIVE SLAVES of LIBERTY proved a watershed event for African cinema—the continent’s first musical as well as a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joyous agitprop. Using an enormous mock slave ship as the film’s only soundstage, Hondo mounts intricately choreographed reenactments and dance numbers across his multipurpose set to investigate more than three centuries of imperialist oppression. The story traverses the West Indies, Europe, and the Middle Passage; jumps across time to depict the effects of official French policy upon the colonized, the enslaved, and their descendants; and surveys the actions and motivations of the resigned, the revolutionary, and the powers that be (along with their lackeys).No mere extravaganza, West Indies is a call to arms for a spectacular yet critical cinematic reimagining of an entire people’s history of resistance and struggle.

PRECEDED BY:

MEETING THE MAN: JAMES BALDWIN IN PARIS

Terence Dixon, 1970, 27 Minutes

In 1970, a British film crew set out to make a straightforward literary portrait of James Baldwin set in Paris, insisting on setting aside his political activism. Baldwin bristled at their questions, and the result is a fascinating, confrontational, often uncomfortable butting of heads between the filmmakers and their subject, in which the author visits the Bastille and other Parisian landmarks and reflects on revolution, colonialism, and what it means to be a Black expatriate in Europe.

+ Introduction by Kazembe Balagun

$15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price