Fanon

France, Luxembourg, Canada, Belgium | 2024 | 133 min

Language: French, Arabic

Subtitles: English

Suitable for audiences aged 12 and above

Director(s): Jean-Claude Barny

Script: Philippe Bernard, Jean-Claude Barny

Cast: Alexandre Bouyer, Déborah François, Stanislas Merhar, Mehdi Senoussi, Olivier Gourmet, Arthur Dupont, Salomé Partouche, Salem Kali, Sfaya Mbarki, Nicolas Buchoux

Production: Special Touch Studios, Paul Thiltges Distributions – PTD, Peripheria Productions, WebSpider Productions

Distribution: Ramonda

Drama

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Screenings:

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 some time 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.

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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.

Olivia Popp, Cineuropa

Updated 2025-08-26 16:45:08 UTC