Soleil Ô

I saw this as part of the BFI film festival in October 2017 in London. I was curious because it featured immigration from Mauritania, a country I had visited decades before, to France, who were the colonialist rulers of Mauritania.

The film starts in a really interesting and visual manner with many of the first scenes framing whats to come in the rest of the movie.

The themes in the movie are as relevant now in 2017 as they were back in the 1960's/70's. The acting is acceptable, and one can only marvel at the innovative way the film is made on such a low budget.

I was laughing, crying, dismaying, basically this film makes the viewer go through a gamut of emotions.

I think this film should be essential viewing for anyone interested in colonialism, racism, immigration, and last but not least, African cinema.

This is one of those movies that reminds you of the injustices rampaging through the world that we tend to dismiss or keep a blind eye on. The main idea is the alienation of the "others" - those who come from a different cultural background - in favor of the "locals". Here we see how in France a black is struggling to find a job and a place to live just because he's black - his education and his skills are often overlooked as, to the "locals" he's firstly labeled as black, all of his other traits (place of origin, cultural heritage, beliefs, profession, etc.) fall under this ethnic label. The same is with arabs - they're firstly arab, even if they been born in France or another European country and have lived their whole lives, perhaps they're even a 2nd or 3rd generation to live there - there's just a culture that isn't open to welcome there for who they are without putting an ethnic label on them first and basing everything off that one label.

In the movie we get to see these interactions and the gazes people throw at the black population in France, we can hear how seeing a black man with a white woman makes people uncomfortable and even bar-table theories about how in a 100 Africa will "occupy" France (figuratively, as in the African population is the future of France). The main protagonist, who we see calm and collected throughout the movie falls victim to this injustice on multiple levels - not only is he shunned from getting a job that would match his education and a comfortable apartment, but he's also broken physiologically - he starts losing it, and, with the most surreal experience movie experience I've encountered recently, he starts getting calls backs home from, what I assume, is nature - the indifference of the land he stepped on has caused him to hear ethnic drums, see signs that remind of unknown ethnic relics and urges to scream at the top of his lungs. To witness this is one thing, to explain it is different and I urge you to watch yourself to see how injustice can drive even the strongest of spirits mad.

This is, no doubt, one of the greatest masterpieces of cinema I have ever seen. It's certainly not your typical entertainment-focused movie, but if you are looking for something beautiful, poetic, artistic, and innovative? This movie is for you.

The camera work, the nonlinearity of the plot, the montage, and pretty much everything else here is done with mastery.

I have recently realized that I know near to nothing about African cinema and there are many obvious and non-obvious reasons for that, but the main one is just how neglectful the Western societies have been towards African history and culture in general. It is past time we give them the spotlight they deserve. This movie and Touki-Bouki are excellent examples of such high quality cinema that certainly deserve to be in those BFI, AFI, Sight and Sound top 100 movie lists - Touki-Bouki actually made it to one of them (at the bottom).

First you mess up the lives of millions of people through slavery and then you make sure they can never recover by just being racist, whether systemically or just personally. That's the way of the colonizing European powers.

A sign of a good movie: I get retrospective about my own actions. I teach students from all over Europe, Africa and Asia (with a random student from South America thrown in), so am I fair with them or do I harbor racist thoughts similar to many of the white characters in this movie? I would hope not, but science does say otherwise. We are racist by nature, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be better about it.

Hondo's own history has probably informed the movie quite a bit. He was born in Morocco, but his mother was from Mauritania and Hondo emigrated to France at a young age. There he found that similarly to the main character of this movie, he couldn't find work in his chosen field (as a chef), so he was "forced" into filmmaking.

Anyhow, the movie itself is a an interesting debut from an area we hardly ever see movies from. It mixes straightforward realism with a little bit of surrealism, which becomes more obvious near the end of the movie. Sometimes characters break the 4th wall on purpose, sometimes by accident, which makes this somewhat hard to immerse yourself in, as you (at least I) begin to secondguess what is deliberate and what is not. It isn't too distracting though.

While this mostly deals with racism, it does get into intersectionalism, at least to an extent, even if it wasn't really a concept back in the 60s (as far as I know). Class is also a major factor in the events, but other groups are not discussed (not that one movie needs to "fix" everything).

I did like the movie quite a bit, even if the seams are somewhat visible. The movie manages to juggle many topics without dropping any balls. The main character is portrayed as very sympathetic and you do understand his blight. It is a pity that the movie was almost lost for a time.