West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty

The absolute pinnacle of black cinema. A piece that puts the legacy of French colonialism under scorn and mockery in Brechtian style theatre. From christianity as a tool of white supremacist gaslighting/repression to the counterinsurgecy against the resistance of true…

edgard713

1st Med Hondo Bloody hell this is Cinema. From the first thrums of the guitar as the camera panned around an ornate throne in front of a map, I was absolutely hooked by Hondo's highly distinctive vision of post-colonialism and his re-purposing of the musical genre as a…

Doc Lyon

As often with Med Hondo's work form follows a political position. West Indies is a musical about a history of imperialist oppression, French rule on the Caribbean islands in specifics but standing for far more, and the big show becomes a key form of react to it.…

Filipe Furtado

Med Hondo's masterpiece was totally unavailable for decades after tepid French reception, and no wonder; it excoriates the entirety of French society and its dominant power structure as damningly as Ken Russell's The Devils. West Indies saw a brief revival a few years ago…

Jack Often

criminally underrated how does something with production design and choreographed dance numbers like this have less than 5k views on this app I don't understand

Evasive

"Don't listen to their books or statues!" The arc of official history denied by the arc of a tracking shot. Liberal teleology subverted by a moving camera that condenses centuries and crosses continents, reordering time and space to recover a people's truth from the lies…

Tom Moffat

Sure enough the word masterpiece gets thrown about a whole lot these days, but stumbling upon this one-of-a-kind historical epic unaware of its background, you‘d be forgiven to think it must be high among the undisputed classics of World Cinema. All the more surprising then…

Schratzi

Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s West Indies: The 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…

Janus Films

Busby Brecht. A feverish evocation of a brand of postcolonial spectacle cinema that was never allowed to be.

dirtylaundri