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The Notebook Primer introduces vital figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.Soleil Ô.Historian-Filmmaker, Filmmaker-HistorianMed Hondo’s debut feature, Soleil Ô (1970), concludes with a series of close-up and wide shots of a man screaming, each successive image accompanied by a prolonged, guttural groan. For Hondo, making the film was a form of therapy as he processed his own experiences of racial oppression and alienation as a young African immigrant living in Marseille. Like his contemporaries Ousmane Sembène, Sarah Maldoror, and Safi Faye, Hondo used cinema to interrogate the conditions of immigrant African labor in the metropole. In his expressionist rendering of this eruptive, cathartic scream, Hondo captures a moment of release from the psychological toll of colonization, a prospect Frantz Fanon described in his writings. Here, cinema works to awaken the consciousness of the colonized and plant the seeds of revolution for the liberation of the African continent and diaspora.

Med Hondo’s 1979 musical extravaganza West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty is a satirical skewering of the legacy of French imperialism in the West Indies and beyond. From the outset, it defies categorization through its distinct sense of free association as it leaps from one colorful image to the next, often shunning context along the way. Throughout Hondo’s film, the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of haughty, predominately white French aristocrats, bureaucrats, and citizens is combatted, challenged, or lampooned by various African figures. Some are slaves, some are revolutionaries, while some are simply power hungry. The result is a deliriously iconoclastic anti-colonialist work that’s worthy of the finest films from roughly the same period by Ousmane Sembene and Dijbril Diop Mambéty.

Adapted by Hondo and Daniel Boukman from the latter’s novel Les Negriers, West Indies traces an epic history of colonial oppression and enslavement in the West Indies,...

The recent retrospective of Juliet Berto’s acting work at the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents an artist who occupied the forefront of both formal and ideological reimaginings of the medium during her lifetime. An icon of the French New Wave for her roles in landmark films by Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard, she also regularly lent her presence to works of radical leftist filmmaking from directors such as Robert Kramer and Marin Karmitz. Neige, Berto’s 1981 directorial debut made in collaboration with her partner Jean-Henri Roger, bears the influence of these artists and synthesizes them into something entirely its own, a playful and unpretentious work that nonetheless retains a fierce political anger.

The title of the film—which translates to Snow in English—refers to heroin, the drug around which much of the plot revolves. Berto stars as Anita, a bartender in Paris’s racy Pigalle district whose committed...

The Berlin International Film Festival has made a series of additions to its 2022 program, including unveiling the Books At Berlinale industry event lineup and a selection of films for the Forum strand.

As reported yesterday, the festival is slimming down the core days of its film program this year, with all premieres taking place February 10-16, and repeat screenings running 17-20. Cinemas will also be at 50% capacity, among other restrictions.

Also announced yesterday was the opening film, François Ozon’s Peter Von Kant.

Today, the fest has revealed the 10 books that will take part in Books At Berlinale this year, which is part of the Co-Production market and will thus run virtually as per the rest of the industry activity in the European Film Market.

Berlin has also announced a selection of titles in its Forum Special titles, including films that continue the Fiktionsbescheinigung series that began as part of...