Soleil O (1973)

Name: Soleil O
Genre: Drama
Released: 1973-01-04
Duration: 104 min
Rating: 6.8
Cast: Robert Liensol, Théo Légitimus, Ambroise Mbia, Gabriel Glissant, Akonio Dolo

Soleil O (1973), directed by Med Hondo, starring Robert Liensol and Théo Légitimus.

01/04/1973 BR Drama 1h 44m

User
score

Quiz about this movie

Synopsis

An educated native of Mauritania tries to find work in Paris but encounters difficulty because of his race.

François CatonnéCinematography
Jean-Claude RahagaCinematography
Med HondoDirector, Writer
Clément MenuetEditing

About the film

Soleil Ô ([sɔ.lɛj o]; "Oh, Sun") is a 1970 French-Mauritanian drama film written and directed by Med Hondo.

The title refers to 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.

Read the full article (2k characters)

Soleil Ô ([sɔ.lɛj o]; "Oh, Sun") is a 1970 French-Mauritanian drama film written and directed by Med Hondo.

The title refers to 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.

Premise

A black immigrant makes his way to Paris in search of his Gaul ancestors. The immigrants desperately seek work and a place to live, but find themselves face to face with indifference, rejection, and humiliation, before heeding the final call for uprising.

Cast

Robert Liensol as Visitor

Théo Légitimus as Afro Girl

Gabriel Glissand

Bernard Fresson as Friend

Yane Barry as White Girl

Greg Germain

Armand Meffre

Med Hondo as the narrator

Reception

The film played during the International Critics' Week at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, where it received critical acclaim. It received a Golden Leopard award at the 1970 Locarno International Film Festival.

In his Family Guide to Movies on Video, Henry Herx wrote that the film's "use of ironic humor and lively music keeps the plight of the black emigrant worker from becoming totally depressing."

In The New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote: "Making friends among France's white population, [the main character] finds their empathy condescending and oblivious, and his sense of isolation and persecution raises his identity crisis to a frenzied pitch. Hondo offers a stylistic collage to reflect the protagonist’s extremes of experience, from docudrama and musical numbers to slapstick absurdity, from dream sequences and bourgeois melodrama to political analyses."

Restoration

In 2017, Soleil Ô was restored by Cineteca di Bologna. The funding for the restoration came from the George Lucas Family Foundation and the World Cinema Project, as part of the latter's restoration initiative called the African Film Heritage Project.

References

African Film Festival of Cordoba-FCAT (license CC BY-SA-3.0)

External links

Soleil Ô at IMDb

Soleil Ô: “I Bring You Greetings from Africa” an essay by Aboubakar Sanogo at the Criterion Collection

Text from Soleil Ô on Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soleil_Ô

Trivia

It premiered on January 4, 1973, a Thursday.
It runs 1h44 — a typical feature length.
It won 1 award(s) and received 0 nomination(s) on record at Wikidata — Golden Leopard among them.
This film's quiz has 11 questions — enough to play more than once without repeats.