Gabriel Glissant

La machette et le marteau

Gabriel Glissant

Shot during the cane workers' strikes in 1975, this first authentically West Indian film bluntly depicts Guadeloupe as it was, thirty years after departmentalization.

Soleil O

Med Hondo

Robert Liensol, Theo Legitimus

The film Soleil Ô, shot over four years with a very low budget, tells the story of a black immigrant who makes his way to Paris in search of “his Gaul ancestors”. This manifesto denounces a new form of slavery: The immigrants desperately seek work, a place to live, but find themselves face to face with indifference, rejection, humiliation…until the final call for uprising. “Soleil Ô” is the title of a West Indian song that tells of the pain of the black people from Dahomey (now Benin) who were taken to the Caribbean as slaves.

West Indies

Med Hondo

Robert Liensol, Roland Bertin

A single-set color musical tracing the history of the West Indies through several centuries of French oppression.

Et les chiens se taisaient

Sarah Maldoror

Gabriel Glissant, Sarah Maldoror

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

Chiba Ti Mal - Là

Gabriel Glissant

A Creole kung-fu film.