“Run, comrade, the old world is after you” is the English translation of the title of this program, which stems from one of the slogans of the French ’68 movement.

This slogan found its way in turn into SOLEIL Ô (1969), probably the most well known film by Med Hondo, the avant-garde filmmaker, actor, and voiceover artist who was born in Mauretania and has been living in the Paris banlieue for more than 50 years now. In his lengthy career as an independent filmmaker, Med Hondo hasn’t just made films that reveal the political topicality of African and diaspora history and dared to make artistic breakthroughs in the process. He has also succeeded in setting cinema itself in motion and developing alternatives to European and American production and distribution structures.

The film program of the exhibition and film project “Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi” curated by Enoka Ayemba, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, and Brigitta Kuster is aimed at the vanishing point which speaks forth from Med Hondo’s films against social encrustation and ignorance towards everyday racism. Med Hondo’s films draw their power from the need to be always be one step ahead of constraints, prejudices, and regulations in order to create a space for oneself, for anger, for big images, for a pluriversal historiography, for corporealities, colors, and temperatures. Med Hondo is a self-made man who begun working in theater and appropriated the methods of filmmaking in uncompromising fashioning: with his head, his heart and senses, with passion, eclecticism, and fashionable moments and ruptures. Seven of the twelve films made by this cinematic border-crosser between 1968 and 2004 will now be shown anew and in combination with auteur films, experimental films, and video art. The intention here is to emphasize connections based on geography, motifs or the senses and he points of contact with different forms of abstraction and sound and to amplify the echoes of Med Hondo’s cinematic cosmos, which extends beyond the Mauritanian/Algerian/Western Saharan/Malian/Caribbean, and Parisian film locations and his own origins.

Find detailed information about the screening programme HERE

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The screening at Kino Arsenal will be accompanied by:

Conversations with Martin Ambarra, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Madeleine Bernstorff, Ute Fendler, June Givanni, Astrid Kusser Ferreira, Olivier Marbœuf, Shaheen Merali, Viktoria Metschl, Akin Omotoso, Abdoulaye Sounaye, and Ibrahima Wane. They will be speaking about the films, together with the curators Enoka Ayemba, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Brigitta Kuster.

As guests we welcome are Max Annas, Ahmed Bedjaoui, Darryl Els, Pascale Obolo, Lyès Semiane, and Cara Snyman.

“Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi” – an exhibition with Theo Eshetu at Archive Kabinett from  August 20 – September 10 and Sebastian Bodirsky and Guy Woueté at SAVVY Contemporary from 26th August – 3rd September.

There will also be a workshop at silent green Kulturquartier & Archive Kabinett, from 1st – 3rd September.

The project is being supported by the TURN fund of the Federal Cultural Foundation. With thanks to the Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Goethe-Institut Yaoundé, Archive Kabinett, SAVVY Contemporary, and silent green Kulturquartier.