“Med Hondo's West Indies is a revolutionary musical in both senses of the word. This witty, scathing Mauritanian-Algerian co-production offers an angry view of West Indian history, using imaginative staging and a very fluid visual style. The film's single set is an enormous slave ship (built in an unused Citroen factory in Paris--ed.).... 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. The material has the potential for overbearing irony...(but) Mr. Hondo has a light touch.... With cast members rotating their way through many different roles (the same actors may play slaves, then worried island villagers, then displaced West Indians...in Paris)...Mr. Hondo leads the film through a long series of well-connected tableaux, culminating in an almost joyous call to arms. The soundtrack accompaniment to all this varies...from labored breathing...to calypso music....” Janet Maslin, New York Times, 3/8/85.