22.10.25, 20:30, West Indies (1979)

In 2019, Mauritanian-French filmmaker Med Hondo passed away. With an oeuvre as militant as it was playful, he managed to hold up a mirror to the French state regarding its colonial past and present. With West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, he built on the radical formal experiments and colonial politics of earlier films such as Soleil Ô (1967) and Les Bicots-Nègres vos voisins (1974). Based on Daniel Boukman's controversial play The Slavers (1971), the film offers an overview of the 17th-century struggle for emancipation in the French Antilles. However, Hondo saw the adaptation as a musical epic that mixes cultural forms, styles, and genres to expose the entanglement of racism and capitalism in the foundations of the French state.

Filmed entirely on a replica slave ship in an abandoned Citroën factory, Hondo managed to bring his ambitions to life with big-budget bravura. The result landed somewhere between Broadway and Bertolt Brecht. In Hondo's meta-historical narrative, there is room for narrative wit and formal adventures even through the darkness of colonial trauma. Cause and effect are thus omitted in favor of an impressive tour de force in which the violence of the past continues to echo as farce and tragedy.