Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun) Film

Synopsis

In West Africa, black men line up before a white priest for baptism and renaming. In France, colonial blacks, encouraged by propaganda, arrive to seek a better life. What they find is unemployment, unacceptable living conditions, blatant racism, and bureaucratic indifference. Searching for a new cinematic language, Mauritanian director Med Hondo eschewed conventional narrative forms in this experimental masterpiece. A scathing attack on colonialism, the film is also a shocking exposé of racism and a brutal indictment of Western capitalist values, as relevant today as it was in the 1960s.

The film first screened at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, and screened again at Cannes in 2017, after its restoration by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation at the Cineteca di Bologna. Soleil O is as important as Battle of Algiers in its anti-colonial urgency, and is rightly celebrated by scholars and critics as occupying a central place in the history of African film. After the recent restoration of the film, this is one of the first chances to view it in the UK.

This screening is part of AiM’s focus on Africa’s Lost Classics, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).