A CINEMA ON THE RUN: The Trailblazing Career of Med Hondo

There are also the more straightforward documentaries championing support of the Sahrawi independence movement led by the Polisario Front in Western Sahara (Nous aurons toute la mort pour dormir (We Will Have All of Death to Sleep, 1977), and condemning the neocolonial annihilation of African agriculture and economies resulting in famine in Sahel, la faim pourquoi? (1979). The notion of "running"-literally across borders, and metaphorically across history and cinematic norms-permeates Hondo's work, and it is perhaps apt and inevitable that the first-ever English-language books about the filmmaker cite it in their titles. 1970-2018 Interviews with Med Hondo: A Cinema on the Run and On the Run: Perspectives on The Cinema of Med Hondo are a diptych of sorts published by the Berlin-based Archive Books in conjunction with Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video Art. Soleil Ô remains the most readily available title, with its profile recently enhanced by the release of a version restored by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017 and released last year, along with five other acclaimed foreign films, in The Criterion Collection's third box set celebrating the work of Scorsese's World Cinema Project. Traveling through time by reading Hondo's conversations over five decades in Interviews, the sad truth is that he and fellow African filmmakers remained entrenched in a virtual state of limbo, one in which they have barely made any progress in their pursuit of funding, distribution, or appreciation of their work.