Film Forum

Algeria/Mauritania/France, 1979
Directed by Med Hondo
In French with English subtitles
Approx. 116 min. 4K DCP Restoration.

French-Mauritanian filmmaker Hondo tells the story of French imperialism as a musical extravaganza (at $1.3 million, the biggest-budget African production ever), adapted from Les Négriers (The Slavers) by Martinican playwright Daniel Boukman. Guadeloupe-born writer Maryse Condé saw it as proof that “militant cinema can be beautiful and rich.” “This witty, scathing Mauritanian-Algerian co-production offers an angry view of West Indian history, using imaginative staging and a fluid visual style. The film’s single set is an enormous slave ship (built in an unused Citroën factory in Paris.)... Mobile camerawork and frequent narrative shifts take the actors through various vignettes about French colonialists invading the Indies, Caribbean natives lured to Paris, the process by which the islands were first settled and a lot more... Mr. Hondo leads the film through a long series of well-connected tableaux, culminating in an almost joyous call to arms.” – Janet Maslin, The New York Times

Presented in conjunction with a two-week retrospective of Med Hondo's other work at Anthology Film Archives, opening March 22.

Restored by the Harvard Film Archive and Ciné-Archives using the original 35mm picture negative and magnetic track. Financial support provided by the McMillan-Stewart Foundation and film services by Blackhawk Films and Lumières Numériques.

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE

Reviews

“A REVOLUTIONARY MUSICAL IN BOTH SENSES OF THE WORD.”
– The New York Times

"Spectacular and scathing. The ugly history of the French empire, from the seventeenth century to modern times, unfolds as an eye-catching feast of pageantry and a revolutionary call to arms.” 
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker 

“An exact and rousing dissection of the political economy of slavery, of the social relations that both determine it and derive from it. WEST INDIES does not merely criticize the greed and brutality of the white man but dismantles the whole colonial edifice by baring its whole structure.”
– Giovanni Vimercati, Los Angeles Review of Books

“WITTY, SCATHING... Hondo leads the film through a long series of well-connected tableaux, culminating in an almost joyous call to arms.”
– Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“STUNNING… A landmark in African cinema…A scathing musical satire…
Avant-garde grand theater…A technological and artistic achievement in African cinema history, and not even just continental Africa; the entire diaspora.”
– Blavity

“One of the most important films to ever come out of African cinema. Part history lesson and part state of affairs address, WEST INDIES is a shockingly volatile and impressive piece of cinema that entertains as well as it advocates.”
– Wilfred Okiche, MUBI Notebook