Frantz Fanon once wrote: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” And what if Jean-Claude Barny’s mission was to shake the very foundations of Francophone Black cinema?
I left the screening full of doubt and questions. Moved! Proud! Jean-Claude Barny’s film Fanon does not leave you indifferent. It provokes. It challenges. It presses where it hurts. And that might be one of the reasons this film seems, in some respects, to be boycotted.
With Fanon, a clear threshold has been crossed. We break free from the cliché roles too often assigned to Black actors: the comic reliefs, the folklorized figures, the secondary characters. It marks a new stage for Francophone Black cinema—one where truth is spoken, injustices denounced, and realities unveiled—without hiding behind humor or irony. Here, there are no pretenses, no jokes to soothe the tension. Just raw truth, delivered through a masterful narrative and powerful direction.
Jean-Claude Barny, much like Spike Lee with Malcolm X, uses the figure of Frantz Fanon to go far beyond a traditional biography. He confronts us with history—its silences, its hypocrisies. He demystifies the relationships between colonizers and the colonized—relationships of the past whose bitter echoes still linger today.
This film is an act of remembrance and education, yet it never slips into heavy-handed didacticism. It pushes us to think, to question our own relationship to history, to identity, to resistance. It shakes our conscience and calls us to move out of passive observation.
I won’t say more. Fanon is a film to see, to experience, to debate. I urge everyone to go watch it in theaters, to form their own opinion. Because one thing is certain: this film does not leave you indifferent. And that’s exactly what makes it essential.
FANON – OFFICIAL TRAILER
