There’s no movie that operates quite like Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, a decades-spanning yet extremely cloistered musical about the horrors of slavery and colonialism––essentially the most dazzling take one could have on such blood-chilling material. Having only seen it on a less-than-ideal rip years prior, I’m pleased the film’s received a restoration (courtesy the Harvard Film Archive and Ciné-Archives) acquired by Janus Films and beginning a roll-out at Film Forum on March 22, coinciding with Anthology’s Hondo retrospective starting the same day.
Ahead of this is a trailer that (lo and behold) far exceeds what I’d seen while giving sense of Hondo’s sui generis scale. While it’s impossible to predict how things land in such an exceedingly generous time for restorations and re-releases, West Indies will engender far greater interest than most.
Find preview and poster below:
Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty proved a watershed event for African cinema—the continent’s first musical as well as a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joyous agitprop. Using an enormous mock slave ship as the film’s only soundstage, Hondo mounts intricately choreographed reenactments and dance numbers across his multipurpose set to investigate more than three centuries of imperialist oppression. The story traverses the West Indies, Europe, and the Middle Passage; jumps across time to depict the effects of official French policy upon the colonized, the enslaved, and their descendants; and surveys the actions and motivations of the resigned, the revolutionary, and the powers that be (along with their lackeys). No mere extravaganza, West Indies is a call to arms for a spectacular yet critical cinematic reimagining of an entire people’s history of resistance and struggle.
