Med Hondo

Mauritania • 2022 • 46 min

Story

Med Hondo is best known to much of Europe for dubbing Eddie Murphy’s character, Donkey, into French in the Oscar-winning animated film Shrek. He also dubbed Rafiki in The Lion King, Dillon in Predator and Hallorann in The Shining.

The Al Jazeera documentary, Med Hondo: A founding father of African cinema, shifts the focus back onto his celebrated career as a director, which was partly funded by his dubbing work.

His debut feature, Soleil Ô (Oh Sun), about a Mauritanian who emigrates to Paris, won the top prize at Locarno in 1970 and screened at Berlin and Cannes Critics’ Week. It was briefly banned in France but now regularly appears in lists of the top 10 African films of all time, from the BFI to the Tarifa-Tangiers African Film Festival (FCAT).

Nous aurons toute la mort pour dormir, his documentary on the Sahrawi independence movement in Western Sahara, won the Forum of New Cinema Prize at Berlin in 1977. His later films won the top awards at key African festivals like Carthage (Arabs and N*ggers, Your Neighbours) and FESPACO (Sarraounia).

All this after stowing away on a ship from Mauritania to France and facing police scrutiny in Marseille because he lacked legal papers.

Soleil Ô was the first film restored under the African Film Heritage Project, the initiative launched by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation, UNESCO, FEPACI and Cineteca di Bologna to preserve African cinema. Hondo was actively involved in the restoration and lived to see Soleil Ô rediscovered by a new generation of critics after screenings at Cannes and London in 2017.

He passed away in 2019 and was buried in Morocco - framed in the documentary as a protest against his treatment in both Mauritania and France

Did you know?

• Read Hondo’s 1979 manifesto, What is cinema for us?. There is still much work to be done.