Les Bicots-nègres, vos voisins (1974)

Directed by

Med Hondo

Genre

documentary film

Country

France, Mauritania

Runtime

2h 40m

Rating

6.7 of 10 from 3 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This documentary shows the lives of African immigrant workers in France and argues that they face exploitation similar to slavery. A long opening monologue criticizes how African people have been shown in films.

polemicalangryeducativeconfrontationalsoberingdidacticslow-pacedearnest

What happens

Les Bicots-nègres, vos voisins (Arabs and Niggers, Your Neighbours) is a 1974 French-Mauritanian film, written and directed by Med Hondo. Les Bicots-nègres, vos voisins, a three-hour documentary, was Hondo's second feature-length film and his first colour feature. It opened with a 21-minute monologue in which a man, speaking directly to camera, expounded the history of cinematic representation in Africa. As in his debut film, Soleil O (1970), Hondo addressed the racism encountered by African immigrants in France, and the continuities between slavery and the postcolonial exploitation of migrant labour: I wanted to show that these workers aren't eating anyone else's food, and that they hardly get what is theirs by right. And to show how they live, and what their problems are, their difficulties, their contradictions, all of them things that European workers know but poorly. The film won the Gold Tanit at the 1974 Carthage Film Festival. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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