FRANTZ FANON: CRNA KOŽA, BIJELA MASKA
/ Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask

United Kingdom
1996. / 70’ / 35mm

Directed by:
Isaac Julien

Written by:
Isaac Julien, Mark Nash

Producer:
Karima Ladjimi

Cast:
Colin Salmon, Halima Daoud, Amir M. Korangy

Distribution:
BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE
Annabelle Shaw
Rights Database Manager
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7957 4785
Fax: +44 (0) 20 7436 4014
Email: annabelle.shaw@bfi.org.uk

A poetic, postcolonial, documentary-fiction film, directed by British visual artist Isaac Julien and produced by curator and theoretician Mark Nash, is a palimpsest of various archive and film materials, reconstructions and reenactments of diasporic time and space in which a Caribbean thinker, psychiatrist and revolutionary of French education Frantz Fanon lived (1925-1961, author of Black Skin, White Mask 1952, The Wretched of the Earth 1961). The filmic reflection on the revival of interest in Fanon’s ideas in visual and performance art and politics of body in the black arts movement, with originality and broadness that goes beyond the modus of theory film, and it’s the first film that deals entirely with Fanon’s legacy in contemporary culture. Julien explores the colonial situation of the Third World in Fanon’s time through postcolonial discourse which raises questions of nation, gender, race, sexuality, generations and ideology, through layers of archive materials, parts of canonical political films (by Gillo Pontecorvo and René Vautier), reenactments with Colin Salmon as Fanon, interviews with Fanon’s family, colleagues, other psychiatrists and scientists who talk about Fanon’s social-therapy, reforms of colonial psychiatry on the psychiatric ward Blide-Joinville, issues of nationalism and violence, and the position of women in Tunisian and Algerian society.

Isaac Julien, born in 1960 in London, is a British visual artist, a visiting lecturer at many universities . His works were awarded and presented at the most important festivals and exhibitions of visual and contemporary art. His political and esthetically provocative films deal with racial and gender identity, issues of class, sexuality, history of art and culture. He is one of the founders of Sankofa Film and Video Collective, which explores the role of artists and intellectuals and cultural forms of African diaspora.

Some films: Baltimore 2003, BaadAsssss Cinema 2002, Paradise Omeros 2002, Darker Side of Black 1983, Young Soul Rebels 1991, Looking for Langston 1989, This is Not an AIDS Advertisement 1987, Territories 1984, Who Killed Colin Roach? 1983.