Soleil Ô

(Oh, Sun)

Med Hondo
Mauritania, 1970

New Digital Restoration

  • Introduction
    Christina Gerhardt

    Guest curator Christina Gerhardt, a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies, discusses her new book 1968 and Global Cinema, coedited with Sara Saljoughi.

featuring

Robert Liensol, Théo Légitimus, Yane Barry,

Soleil Ô, which takes its title from a West Indies song about the pain of Africans enslaved in the Caribbean, is a powerful depiction of immigrant experience, focused on a laborer who moves to Paris from West Africa in hopes of a better life. Instead he encounters a new iteration of slavery, postcolonial style—unemployment, institutional indifference, police hostility, and entrenched racism. Med Hondo relates, “All the scenes were based on reality. Because racism isn’t invented, especially in film. It’s like a kind of cloak put on you, that you’re forced to live with.”

FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Med Hondo
Cinematographer
  • François Catonné
Language
  • French
  • Arabic
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • DCP
  • 98 mins
Source
  • Cineteca di Bologna
Additional Info
  • 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.