Mes Voisins (My Neighbours), 1971

35 minutes

Programmed in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Pacita Abad: I Thought the Streets Were Paved with Gold’.

Mes Voisins looks at race relations in 1970s France, through interviewing migrant laborers on working and living conditions in Paris. Mes Voisins is part of a larger feature documentary, the critically acclaimed Les Bicots-Nègres vos voisins (1974) exploring post-colonial realities in France through the everyday trials and tribulations of the largely African labouring diaspora.

Med Hondo (b. 1936 Atar, Mauritania 1936-d. 2019, Paris, France).

Originally from Mauritania, Hondo emigrated to France in the 1950s, founding a theatre group and subsequently turning to filmmaking, becoming one of African’s most acclaimed film directors. His first feature, Soleil Ô (1969), garnered him critical acclaim. His cinematic oeuvre addresses the history of the continent and its diasporas and includes Sarraounia (1986), based on the true story of a West African queen’s struggle against French colonial troops at the end of the nineteenth century and West Indies (1979), an epic musical spanning nearly four-hundred years of French West Indian history, from enslavement to displacement to France.