In keeping with its ongoing commitment to presenting heritage works of Caribbean cinema, both during its annual festival and as part of its year-round programming, Third Horizon is honored to present a retrospective of restored films at this year’s Festival. Entitled You Don’t Get Freedom, You Take Freedom: Caribbean Activist Cinema 1978–1985, the retrospective comprises four films, all recently restored works, themed around labor and workers’ rights.
Three of the films are documentaries, collaboratively made works of non-fiction, originally shot on 16mm and being presented at THFF25 in beautiful digital restorations. While they were made independently of each other, the films all share a concern for the rights of laboring people, within the context of often exploitative, neocolonial hegemonic power structures. They also reflect the often creative ways in which working people organize to agitate for their rights and for better employment and working conditions.
The final film that rounds out the retrospective is the recent restoration of West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979), directed by the late Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo.
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By Honor Ford-Smith, Harclyde Walcott | 56 mins | 1985 | Jamaica
MAY 30, 5:15PM – Purchase Ticket
Filmed clandestinely under the Duvalier dictatorship, Bitter Cane, presented at THFF25 in a brand new restoration, is an incisive documentary interrogation of the exploitation and domination of the Haitian people. From peasant coffee farms in the rugged tropical mountains to steamy foreign-owned sweatshops in the capital, Port-au-Prince, the film takes the viewer on a journey through Haitian history to a deeper grasp of the country’s political economy today. The film explores the Haiti of the 1980s, a perspective that helps the viewer to better understand the crises that wrack the country now. Bitter Cane shows how foreign capitalists were beginning to drive peasants off the land and into the cities, creating giant shanty towns which have spawned crime, dislocation, and anarchy. Today, 40 years later, we are seeing the culmination of this socio-economic upheaval, which has left the country facing its third foreign military occupation in three decades.
Oema Foe Sranan (women of suriname)
By At van Praag, Nadia Tilon & Luna Hupperetz | 56 mins | 1978 | Suriname, The Netherlands
MAY 30, 5:15PM – Purchase Ticket
Oema Foe Sranan (Women of Suriname) portrays the lives of four women, who relate the history of Dutch (neo)colonialism in Suriname and racism and being disenfranchised in the Netherlands using personal stories. The film was produced by Cineclub Vrijheidsfilms in cooperation with LOSON (the Dutch national organisation for Surinamese people), in the framework of political struggle, as a sign of solidarity between Surinamese and Dutch people, who transfer a collective message about the socio-political situation in Suriname and the Surinamese community in the 1970s. The film centers on the hope for a better future, and liberation from foreign influence.
By Ben Dupuy and Kim Ives | 77 mins | 1983 | Haiti
MAY 31, 5:30PM – Purchase Ticket
Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, presented at THFF25 in a new restoration, proved a watershed event for African cinema—the continent’s first musical as well as a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joyous agitprop. Using an enormous mock slave ship as the film’s only soundstage, Hondo mounts intricately choreographed reenactments and dance numbers across his multipurpose set to investigate more than three centuries of imperialist oppression. The story traverses the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle Passage; jumps across time to depict the effects of official French policy upon the colonized, the enslaved, and their descendants; and surveys the actions and motivations of the resigned, the revolutionary, and the powers that be (along with their lackeys). No mere extravaganza, West Indies is a call to arms for a spectacular yet critical cinematic reimagining of an entire people’s history of resistance and struggle.
West Indies: The FUGITIVE SLAVES of Liberty
By Med Hondo | 116 mins | 1979 | Mauritania, Algeria, France
JUNE 1, 7:30PM – Purchase Ticket
Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, presented at THFF25 in a new restoration, proved a watershed event for African cinema—the continent’s first musical as well as a sui generis amalgam of historical epic, Broadway revue, Brechtian theater, and joyous agitprop. Using an enormous mock slave ship as the film’s only soundstage, Hondo mounts intricately choreographed reenactments and dance numbers across his multipurpose set to investigate more than three centuries of imperialist oppression. The story traverses the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle Passage; jumps across time to depict the effects of official French policy upon the colonized, the enslaved, and their descendants; and surveys the actions and motivations of the resigned, the revolutionary, and the powers that be (along with their lackeys). No mere extravaganza, West Indies is a call to arms for a spectacular yet critical cinematic reimagining of an entire people’s history of resistance and struggle.
