Remembering Frantz Fanon: French biopic on anticolonial thinker filmed in Tunisia
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00:00 French filmmakers have come to this colonial era hospital in the village of
00:03 Menzelburg-Gieba to document the years that Martiniquan psychiatrist and
00:07 philosopher Frantz Fanon spent in Tunisia. It's the first major filmed
00:13 biopic about the late anti-racist and anti-colonial campaigner.
00:16 I was fascinated by him and his thinking. He as a man and his ideas through his
00:21 practice of psychology. This is where I think he was very innovative. He's
00:26 someone who turned psychiatry upside down and I had to explore his life as a
00:30 man as well as an important figure of the 20th century. In the 1950s,
00:35 Frantz Fanon left his mark on psychiatry with his humanism and his reluctance to
00:39 use drug treatments. He also developed the radical concept of ethno-psychiatry
00:42 with the examination of the cultural context of a disorder. He used the ideas
00:46 to define the consequences of colonization on his patients.
00:49 Alexandre Bouillé plays Fanon on the screen. The production introduced him to
00:53 the thinker's work. I realized that I didn't know this man and his story and
01:00 as I learned more I didn't want people to feel the way I did before. I want
01:04 everyone to know about him, both the generations that passed and the
01:08 generations to come. Few in Tunisia remember Fanon. He practiced psychiatry
01:14 at several hospitals there but was also seen as an outsider by intellectuals of
01:18 the time. Reviving Frantz Fanon in political Tunisian thought and practice
01:25 will restore depth to our history. It will bring an African depth.
01:35 Another character in his story was Fanon's wife, Josie, also an anti-colonial activist.
01:40 In fact we have a lot of articles because she was a journalist so we read her
01:44 articles but it's true that we have almost no photos. We found two pictures
01:48 of her and a radio interview. Josie Fanon lost her husband to leukemia when he was
01:54 just 36. He left behind a colossal scholarly legacy on the complexities of
01:58 the impact of colonialism that still shapes academic discourse today.
02:02 The film about his life is set to debut in cinemas in 2024.