First you mess up the lives of millions of people through slavery and then you make sure they can never recover by just being racist, whether systemically or just personally. That's the way of the colonizing European powers.
A sign of a good movie: I get retrospective about my own actions. I teach students from all over Europe, Africa and Asia (with a random student from South America thrown in), so am I fair with them or do I harbor racist thoughts similar to many of the white characters in this movie? I would hope not, but science does say otherwise. We are racist by nature, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be better about it.
Hondo's own history has probably informed the movie quite a bit. He was born in Morocco, but his mother was from Mauritania and Hondo emigrated to France at a young age. There he found that similarly to the main character of this movie, he couldn't find work in his chosen field (as a chef), so he was "forced" into filmmaking.
Anyhow, the movie itself is a an interesting debut from an area we hardly ever see movies from. It mixes straightforward realism with a little bit of surrealism, which becomes more obvious near the end of the movie. Sometimes characters break the 4th wall on purpose, sometimes by accident, which makes this somewhat hard to immerse yourself in, as you (at least I) begin to secondguess what is deliberate and what is not. It isn't too distracting though.
While this mostly deals with racism, it does get into intersectionalism, at least to an extent, even if it wasn't really a concept back in the 60s (as far as I know). Class is also a major factor in the events, but other groups are not discussed (not that one movie needs to "fix" everything).
I did like the movie quite a bit, even if the seams are somewhat visible. The movie manages to juggle many topics without dropping any balls. The main character is portrayed as very sympathetic and you do understand his blight. It is a pity that the movie was almost lost for a time.
