The film I worked the most lengthily and deeply on, in 2017/2018, hopefully out in 2022:

FANON / LES CRIS

A FiIm by Raoul Peck

Synopsis

Like many West Indians from his generation, in 1944, Frantz Fanon left his island to join the troops of “La France Libre” at only 18 years old. He will be granted a medal for his achievements in the field of honour, from the hands of Raoul Salan, a military general who will later serve in Algeria and join a mutiny. 

By the end of 1953, Fanon is a psychiatric doctor and is nominated at the Blida Hospital, in French Algeria. 

With his young wife Josie, he settles in the hospital complex and starts his work in a context marred with paternalism and racism, where doctors consider the Arabs as “scientifically inferior”. 

Passionate and impatient, Fanon wants to revolutionise both mentalities and methods in the psychiatric asylum, by launching common activities for patients and medics, though more dialogue and group therapy. With the help of a few of his young junior doctors, he profoundly changes the practice at the hospital, despite the opposition of others doctors, while, a few months later, the first violent incidents of what will become the “Algerian War” are increasingly multiplying. 

Fanon is absorbed in a spiral of violence and has to deal with the consequences of the use of torture by both the French army and the Algerian freedom fighters. The psychological effects of this level of violence, on both sides, become the central point of his research. Finally, he will have to choose between a total engagement for the Algerian rebellion or complicity with the French system. 

Threatened to death by the radicals of French Algeria and unable to adequately pursue his medical duty, he will decide to quit his position and to join the FLN, the Algerian National Liberation Front. Suddenly stricken with leukaemia, he will die at 36 years old, only a few months before Algeria gains its independence, and just after achieving his masterpiece, the essay The Wretched of the Earth, which will establish him as one of the greatest thinkers of the decolonisation movement.