Med Hondo

Mohamed Abid Hondo was born on the fourth of May 1936 at Atar, in the Adrar region of French Mauritania, the son of a Mauritanian father of the Hassaniya Arab-Berber community and a mother of the West African Hausa community. He was raised in the colonial Mauritanian community of mid-twentieth-century Atar.

He completed his secondary education at Rabat, Morocco in 1958 and worked across the late 1950s at hotel kitchens in Morocco and the South of France.

He emigrated to Marseille in 1959 — and to Paris in 1961 — where he was employed as a dock worker, a hotel cook, and an agricultural laborer across the early 1960s before turning to acting.

He studied acting under Françoise Rosay at the Cours d'Art Dramatique de Paris from 1963 to 1966 — and founded with the Caribbean actor Robert Liensol the Shango Théâtre at Paris in 1966, the principal Black African theatrical company of post-war France.

He directed his first feature film, Soleil Ô, between 1967 and 1970 — a study of African immigration to France filmed on a shoestring budget of approximately thirty thousand francs across three years. Soleil Ô was selected for the Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival of May 1970 and won the Léopard d'or at the Locarno Film Festival of August 1970.

He directed West Indies in 1979 — a one-hundred-and-ten-minute musical study of the French Antillean slave trade filmed at a single cavernous warehouse stage in the eastern Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers — and Sarraounia in 1986, the historical reconstruction of the resistance of the Azna queen Sarraounia Mangou of the Niger to the Voulet-Chanoine French colonial mission of 1899.

Sarraounia won the Étalon de Yennenga, the principal prize of the Festival panafricain du cinéma de Ouagadougou (FESPACO), at the FESPACO of February 1987.

He directed eight further feature films across the late 1980s through the 2010s and worked extensively as a French-language dubbing voice for Eddie Murphy, Morgan Freeman, Richard Pryor, Sidney Poitier, and Muhammad Ali — providing the French voice for approximately ninety of their feature films.

He died at Paris on the second of March 2019 of complications of cancer, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the auteur of Soleil Ô and Sarraounia.