MARTIN SCORSESE’S WORLD CINEMA PROJECT Presents the restoration of SOLEIL Ô (Oh, Sun!) A FILM BY MED HONDO (Mauritania, 1970) Information: Address: [email protected] The Film Foundation/World Cinema Project [email protected] 7920 Sunset Boulevard, 6 th Floor Los Angeles, CA 90046 – USA Film Bookings: 110 W. 57th Street, 6th Floor New York, NY 10019 – USA [email protected] Restoration supported by the George Lucas Family Foundation This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, created by The Film Foundation, FEPACI and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. 1 2 It was purely by chance that we ended up being artists ‘of colour’, as is the term usually used. In Paris together for basically the same reasons, Bachir, Touré, Robert and I found ourselves right in the middle of a country, a city, where we had to get by, for a lack of better words, where we had to work: being an actor, a musician, a singer. And where we realized immediately the doors were closed […]. As a solution we thought of creating a theater group and, in the meantime, we all made Soleil Ô . In order to make the film we had to overcome every bureaucratic and material obstacle, in other words, find a producer and tell him: “It’s the best story around, because we believe in it”. Like they say: “If you’re good at talking, you’re good at making film”. And so, we made Soleil Ô without money […]. All the scenes were based on reality. Because racism isn’t invented, especially in film. It’s like a kind of cloak put on you, that you’re forced to live with. Even the confession scene, at the beginning: in fact, in the Antilles, where I was born, they taught children that knowing how to speak Creole was a sin to confess. I know that the cinema you called cinéma-vérité has always avoid saying things of the kind. The only thing it has done in this sense is take black faces and mix them in the crowds. To demonstrate that as the West continues to expand itself economically, the more it will need black labor. And so Africa will always be an underdeveloped continent: saying the contrary is a lie […]. The original idea was to show tourist spots packed with blacks only. All of a sudden you would see Sacré-Cœur, and you would see only blacks. It would have had a powerful cinematographic impact. But the idea remained on paper and wasn’t translated into images. Med Hondo 3 ABOUT SOLEIL Ô The Mauritanian director Med Hondo’s bitterly insightful, artistically freewheeling 1970 film begins with an antic sketch of the European colonization that subjugated and impoverished Africans. It depicts, with sardonic fury, the adventures of an unnamed young African man (Robert Liensol) who arrives in Paris and, with naïve optimism, seeks his fortune among his colonizers. He considers himself at home in France, but soon discovers the extent of his exclusion from French society. Facing blatant discrimination in employment and housing, he and other African workers organize a union, to little effect; seeking help from African officials in Paris, he finds them utterly corrupt and unsympathetic. Making friends among France’s white population, he 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. Hondo’s passionate, wide-ranging voice-over commentary, addressing the hero in the second person, blends confession and observation, aspiration and despair, societal and personal conflicts. Richard Brody, “The New Yorker” 4 ABOUT THE FILMMAKER The son of farmers, Med Hondo (1936-) was raised in the Atar region of Mauritania on the edge of the Sahara. At 18 he left home to attend cooking school in Morocco, after which he went to work as a chef in France. It was in France that he became interested in the performing arts. Hondo began his artistic career by acting for French theater companies. Frustrated by the roles they offered him, he soon formed a theater ensemble with the aim of producing plays that expressed feelings common among Africans in Europe: exile and estrangement. To earn extra income, he also took parts in movies and television. Through this work he became fascinated with film and taught himself to use a movie camera. In early 1969 Hondo directed his first short film. By the end of the year he completed his first full-length feature, Soleil Ô . It was well received on the international film festival circuit, including the Cannes Film Festival, the Locarno Film Festival and the Festival Panafricain du Cinéma et de la Télévision de Ouagadougou (FESPACO). Since 1969 Hondo has released five feature films, including Les Bicots-Nègres vos voisins (1973), the musical West Indies (1979), and Sarraounia (1986). Hondo’s movies explore conditions of exile and alienation, often examining the case of African expatriates working in France, or the problems of colonization. Through his films, Hondo aims to raise the consciousness of his audiences. Hondo is a prominent member of the Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes (FEPACI), Comité africain de cinéastes (CAC), and the West African Film Corporation, in which he has done much to promote African cinema, particularly the production and international distribution of African films. 5 NOTES ON THE RESTORATION Restored by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Med Hondo at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory. Restoration funded by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, created by The Film Foundation, FEPACI and UNESCO―in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna―to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. The restoration of Soleil Ô was made possible through the use of a 16mm reversal print, and 16mm and 35mm dupe negatives deposited by Med Hondo at Ciné-Archives, the audiovisual archive of the French Communist Party, in Paris. The reversal print was scanned at 4K and digital restoration eliminated dirt, scratches and mold. Despite excellent photographic quality overall, a few sequences appear slightly out–of–focus; this is true to the original cinematography. A vintage 35mm print preserved at the Harvard Film Archive was used as a reference. Color grading was supervised by cinematographer François Catonné. The original 16mm magnetic tracks were used for the audio restoration. After digitization, the soundtrack was cleaned and background noise reduction eliminated all noticeable wear marks; particular attention was devoted to the specific dynamics and features of the original soundtrack, namely percussion and chants. Reel 4 as well as the main and end titles were missing, so these were restored using the original 35mm soundtrack. The latter was also used to replace the 16mm mag tracks in the parts where the mix differed slightly from the vintage 35mm print. CAST & CREDITS / TECHNICAL DATA Directed by: Med Hondo; Set Designer: Med Hondo; Director of Photography: François Catonné, Jean-Claude Rahaga; Editing: Michèle Masnier, Clément Menuet; Music: Georges Anderson; Production Company: Grey Films, Shango Films; Starring: Robert Liensol, Théo Légitimus, Gabriel Glissand, Graig Germain, Mabousso Lô, Alfred Panou, Les Black Echos, Ambroise M’Bia, Akonio Dolo. Running Time: 98’; Black and White. Country of Production: Mauritania; Language: French and Arabic with English subtitles 6 THE FILM FOUNDATION / WORLD CINEMA PROJECT The World Cinema Project is a program of The Film Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and restoration of classic films from around the world. Founded by Martin Scorsese, the foundation supports and encourages preservation efforts to save films and ensure that these works are preserved, seen and shared. “The World Cinema Project is a natural expansion of my love for movies. Nearly thirty years ago, together with my fellow filmmakers, we created The Film Foundation to help preserve classic cinema. Much has been accomplished and much work remains to be done, but The Film Foundation has created a base upon which we can build. There is now, I believe, a film preservation consciousness. The World Cinema Project was created to help underserved countries preserve their cinematic treasures. We want to help strengthen and support the work of international archives, and provide a resource for those countries lacking the archival and technical facilities to do the work themselves.” Martin Scorsese, Founder and Chair 7.