(Algeria, 2024, 1 hour 30 minutes, black and white)
Directed by Abdenour Zahzah

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The first feature film about Frantz Fanon, the French Afro-Caribbean writer -- author of Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) -- from the island of Martinique, a psychiatrist, civil rights activist, and one of the most influential postcolonial thinkers.

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Students introduce the screening. A Q&A via Zoom with the director Abdenour Zahzah will follow. 

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About the film

1953, colonized Algeria. Fanon, a young black psychiatrist is appointed head doctor at the Blida-Joinville Hospital. He was putting his theories of ‘Institutional Psychotherapy’ into practice in opposition to the racist theories of the Algiers School of Psychiatry, while a war broke out in his own wards.

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About the director

Abdenour Zahzah is an Algerian screenwriter, director and producer. Further to his university graduation, Abdenour was director at the Blida (province in Algeria) cinémathèque from 1998 through 2003. His first film "Frantz Fanon," mémoire d’asile was released in 2002. He traveled to France, where he made two documentary films, and spent a long time at the Moulin d’Andé in Normandy, where he made a film with the writer Maurice Pons, "Returning to Algeria."

 

In 2007, he made several commissioned documentaries, but it was with his short fiction film "Garagouz," a multi-award-winning film, that he made a name for himself. After a feature-length documentary, "L’Oued, L’Oued," which won critical acclaim at festivals, he directed his first feature-length fiction film in 2024, about Dr. Frantz Fanon’s Blida-Joinville years.