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On June 9, 2026, the Criterion Collection releases Med Hondo's "West Indies: Les nègres marrons de la liberté" (West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty, 1979) on Blu-ray — a 4K restoration of one of the most crucial and least-seen films in the history of African cinema, paired with a new interview with scholar Aboubakar Sanogo and archival interviews with Hondo himself. The film is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. This disc release gives it a physical form you can buy and add to your collection. That Criterion announcement, which I received a couple of days ago, is what started this exercise. Context: my focus this past month has been almost entirely business-related — the Showmax shutdown, the Next Narrative Africa Fund news, African film financing in its current state, the African Screen Intelligence platform (ASI) I’m building, streaming economics, YouTube ad rates, etc. So when I saw the Criterion news, I started thinking about Med Hondo not only as a filmmaker but also as a businessman and entrepreneur, as someone who had to figure out how to make things, sell things, protect things, and fight for things — qualities filmmakers need to have, even more so today. When we write about the pioneers of African cinema — Hondo, Sembène, Maldoror, Mambety, Faye, Vieyra, Balogun, et al — we most often write about the work. The politics, the aesthetics, the historical conditions. We treat the business environment as background. We rarely ask what they specifically said about it, in their own words, sharing their direct experiences with financing, production, and distribution. Hondo, the Mauritanian firebrand and one of my favorite artist personas, said a great deal. From his first major interview in 1970 through his final recorded conversations in 2018, he documented — in detail — what it cost to make films without a producer, what it felt like to be defrauded by distributors, what he believed needed to change structurally for African cinema to survive, and what he thought of the people and institutions that were supposed to help but didn’t. He died in Paris on March 2, 2019, at the age of 82. However, this is not just a historical record or a closed chapter. What he was describing were financing, distribution, and exhibition problems that still shape how African films are produced, sold, and seen in March 2026.
