Film Forum

(1970, Med Hondo) “Sweet France, to thee I come. I am coming home.” Newly arrived Mauritanian accountant Robert Liensol faces rejection and alienation in Paris. Inspired in part by his experience working menial jobs in France, Hondo’s debut takes its title from a West Indian song. “My work… evolves and revolves around the question of colonial history.” – Hondo. In French, with English subtitles. DCP restoration. Approx 102 min.

Restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in collaboration with Med Hondo. Restoration funded by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project.

This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO - in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna - to help locate, restore and disseminate 50 African films with historic, artistic and cultural significance.

Reviews

“Bitterly insightful, artistically freewheeling… begins with an antic sketch of the European colonization that subjugated and impoverished Africans. It depicts, with sardonic fury, the adventures of an unnamed young African man who arrives in Paris and, with naïve optimism, seeks his fortune among his colonizers… Hondo offers a stylistic collage to reflect the protagonist’s extremes of experience, from docudrama and musical numbers to slapstick absurdity, from dream sequences and bourgeois melodrama to political analyses. Hondo’s passionate, wide-ranging voice-over commentary… blends confession and observation, aspiration and despair, societal and personal conflicts.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker