Med Hondo – Opening Night

“The Indocile Image – A Retrospective on the Cinema of Med Hondo”

Public screening of:  Soleil O (1970) – 105 min

5.30 p.m.
Monday, February 22nd,
National Gallery of Canada, Lecture Hall.

The Indocile Image – A Retrospective on the Cinema of Med Hondo will open with the director’s original masterpiece, Soleil O (1970), tonight (February 22nd) at the National Gallery of Canada’s Lecture Hall at 5.30 pm. Med Hondo will be there to introduce his film and answer the questions. You are all invited!

Soleil O is Med Hondo’s inaugural masterpiece, garnering him the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1970, and instantly securing his place as one of the giants of African and world cinema. Following a loosely constructed narrative of the travails of an accountant confidently arriving in Paris to pursue his dreams, the film meticulously uncovers the challenges he faces including racial, housing and employment discrimination along with sexual objectification. For Med Hondo, filming the migrant condition entails going beyond consequences and analyzing, with caustic humor and imagination, causalities (which include colonialism, the structures of capitalism and the implications of neocolonialism) in order to effect change.

The film announces the arrival of a maverick director intent on taking on the very form of the medium through his use of digression, communicative symbolism, cinema verite, and Eisensteinian montage. This is a film that immediately partakes in the modernist pantheon of the cinema.

Critical Reception at the time of Release

“The greatest African film to date” (Jeune Afrique)

“Soleil O imposes itself: rarely has a first film felt so powerful, so effervescent and so rich as testimony. “Bernard Cohn (Positif)

“One of the most original films selected at the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes 1970 is without doubt Soleil O by Mauritanian director Med Hondo.” (Lettres Françaises).

Full week event program – in PDF: Med-Hondo-program