Med Hondo

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 African films of all time.

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 Carthage and FESPACO.

Soleil Ô was the first film restored under the African Film Heritage Project, launched by Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, UNESCO, FEPACI and Cineteca di Bologna. Hondo lived to see it rediscovered by a new generation after screenings at Cannes and London in 2017.

He died in 2019 and was buried in Morocco—framed in the documentary as a protest against his treatment in both Mauritania and France.