In Tunisia, the filming of a biopic on Frantz Fanon, a writer and psychiatrist committed against French colonization in Algeria, ended in May 2023. The film, which is the first non-documentary work on this anti-racist activist, looks at his contribution to psychiatry in the 1950s. He had denounced psychiatric treatment and desalination techniques during the colonial period and had long campaigned for the independence of Algeria.
When Alexandre Bouyer, a French actor of Cameroonian origin read for the first time the script for the film Fanon, co-written by director Jean-Claude Barny, he was surprised to discover this committed essayist and psychiatrist. “ I did not know Frantz Fanon, he explains. I met Frantz Fanon thanks to Jean-Claude and it’s true that when I read this screenplay, I was struck. I was ashamed – I say it – to tell myself that I didn’t know this person. Then I read his works and there it touched me even more and that’s also what motivated me and I said “Come on, we’re going to go, we’re going to embody this character, we’re going to defend him and we’re going to tell his story
“We really looked for his humanity, his human thought, his workforce”
Born in Martinique in 1925 and died at the age of 36 of overwhelming leukemia, Frantz Fanon marked anti-racist thought, postcolonial studies but also psychiatry. A part of his life sometimes marginalized by posterity.
For the director Jean-Claude Barny, it was also necessary to show the man behind the work and the activism: ” We were really looked for on things that did not exist: his humanity, his human thought, his workforce and also its sociology. It was for me the basis of work to write this screenplay.”
Tunisia served as the main setting for the film both to reconstruct the hospital scenes in Algeria, but also because Frantz Fanon lived and worked in the country. He died on December 6, 1961, a year before Algeria’s independence.
“We have witnessed a re-reading of Fanon in the English-language university world”
If the biopic on Frantz Fanon will perhaps put the author back in the light for the general public, his thought has never ceased to influence academic circles. It was first in the United States and in English that it enjoyed great success, notably thanks to the development of post-colonial studies. Before Frantz Fanon was rediscovered in French at the turn of the 2000s. These back and forth between two visions of the colonial question make his work an essential and very contemporary tool, according to Nadia Yala Kisukidi, novelist and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Paris 8: “We have witnessed a re-reading of Fanon, not in French-speaking or French-speaking spaces, but in the English-speaking university world, on the occasion, essentially, of the blossoming of the current of post-colonial studies. And on the occasion of the 2000s, we will attend conferences, reflections that will begin to react and rethink Fanon’s work in a field this time rather French and French-speaking – I would say – where his work does not had not necessarily been the subject of as many studies as in English-speaking areas. So there are all these round trips, which are extremely interesting to think about, that is to say from a work that has had several lives, several types of reception in different languages and in different spaces, to both academic and political.
