Directed by Jean-Claude Barny—with a screenplay by the director and Philippe Bernard—Fanon will hit the screens in Martinique on April 4, 2025. [I hope it comes to Puerto Rico soon!] In her review of Fanon, Olivia Popp (Cineuropa, 2024) writes, “Jean-Claude Barny makes the life and legacy of Martinican anti-colonial intellectual, psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon accessible without losing the essence of his work.”
Biography (LuxFilmFest): Jean-Claude Barny, a French director of Guadeloupean and Trinidadian origin, blends European auteur cinema with American entertainment. In 1994, he directed Putain de Porte with Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz, then collaborated on the casting of La Haine. Moving to Guadeloupe in 2003, he directed his first feature, Nèg Maron (2005), followed by the mini-series Deadly Tropics. His second film, Gang of the Caribbean (2016), revisits Loïc Lery’s autobiography. After Fanon, he is preparing Siki.
Here are excerpts from Olivia Popp’s Cineuropa review:
While focused on the same period in his life, the simply titled new film Fanon, by French director Jean-Claude Barny (who also has origins in Guadeloupe, and Trinidad and Tobago) can instead be seen as a popular take on the brilliant and influential intellectual’s life. The two films could not be more different: with its glossy cinematographic style, Barny’s is much more commercially viable than its minimalist, black-and-white arthouse counterpart. With a script by Barny and Philippe Bernard, Fanon has just had its world premiere in the Special Screenings section of the 2024 Marrakech International Film Festival.
Fanon traverses the Martinique-born multi-hyphenate’s approximately three-year stay as head of a ward at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria and ends sometime after his departure. We witness how he transformed the field of institutional psychiatry while writing his now-revered psychoanalytical book on colonisation, The Wretched of the Earth. The film also dramatises Fanon’s support of Algeria’s oncoming revolution through secret meetings while never fully indicating that he was, in reality, part of the National Liberation Front (FLN). [. . .]
Fanon is known for writing with a deeply emotional and evocative style that is sometimes difficult to access, but Barny pares the intellectual’s writing down to digestible excerpts. Placed in tandem with universally understandable instances of injustice, the harsh mistreatment of patients echoes the colonial struggle outside the hospital walls. And so, despite its obvious flaws, it must be well noted that Fanon stands out in how it brings the writer’s work and life to the screen in a way that is highly entertaining and well-positioned for commercial audiences. This is Barny’s truest success: maybe Frantz Fanon will finally have the chance to become a name known not only by scholars, activists, and those interested in Pan-Africanism and decolonial thinking. [. . .]
Read more at https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/471102/
Also see https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/fanon-marrakech-review/5199338.article and https://www.luxfilmfest.lu/en/guests/jean-claude-barny/