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Monografie: Med Hondo

Lumière noire

Black Light
Med Hondo
France 1993
103 min
V'22

The film tells the story of a police blunder at a roadblock near Charles de Gaulle airport following a terrorist alert. A motorist is killed in the process. His friend, an aircraft engineer, does not believe the police account of the incident. The only way for him to uncover the truth is to find the only eyewitness to the killing, a young Malian held in a hotel at the airport and waiting to be deported along with one hundred other migrants. The aircraft engineer’s quest leads him all the way to Bamako and eventually the Malian countryside. Unlike his other films, Med Hondo experiments with the crimethriller here (tipping his hat in the process to Orson Welles’ mythic opening sequence of TOUCH OF EVIL) to explore the reality of the deportation of African migrants back to their countries of origin. In the pure guerilla filmmaking tradition, the director and his crew illegally shot some of the scenes at the Paris airport, in part by disguising themselves as airport workers. Only the directintervention of French President François Mitterand himself helped the situation. With LUMIÈRE NOIRE, Hondo explores the ways in which the supposedly “post”-imperial state turns on its own citizens and devours them in situations of crisis, where, as aptly put in the film’s one-liner, “democracy stops where State reason begins.”

In the presence of Aboubakar Sanogo und Zahra Hondo.
Mit MES VOISINS

Credits
  • Patrick Poivey
  • Inês de Medeiros
  • Gilles Ségal
  • Charlie Bauer
  • Roland Bertin
  • Med Hondo (nach dem gleichnamigen Buch von Didier Daeninckx)
  • Ricardo Aronovich
  • Pascal Armant et Philippe Lecocq
  • Christiane Lack
  • Manu Dibango
  • Touré Kunda
MH Films, Serene Productions
ciné-archives
35 mm
Farbe
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