Soleil Ô

The recent, fleeting influx of Moroccan migrants to the Spanish territory of Ceuta made headlines around the world. Numerous young men were quoted as saying that they had crossed the relatively porous border in search of work, employment opportunities being pitifully scarce in their native Morocco. Some also complained of their treatment in Ceuta, describing the startling harshness of a social setting—a climate of prejudice and opposition—that contrasted sharply with the promises of acceptance and advancement that had motivated their migration in the first place. Told that there would be jobs waiting for them in Spain, tens of thousands of migrants arrived to find that their prospects were in fact far bleaker.

Such seemingly timeless stories of hope cultivated and betrayed—of buoyant fantasy meeting crushing reality—form the basic narrative fabric of Soleil Ô. They are what the film is all about. As part of the European Union’s only land border with Africa, Ceuta vividly illustrates the challenges of defining and maintaining such divisions, raising urgent questions about territorial matters that are also at the core of Hondo’s inquisitive film. Where does Europe begin and end? Where does Africa? Where and why do the lines between the two start to blur? How might a person of African ancestry experience the siren call of Gay Paree? And how does the city of one’s dreams end up belying the basis of its lofty reputation?

Upon arriving in Paris, Hondo’s protagonist peruses the want ads in a local newspaper. The first ad he sees is for a rubber factory in Côte d’Ivoire. Looking for work in Europe, he is almost immediately rerouted back to Africa via the classifieds. The French-owned factory is looking for skilled workers between the ages of 25 and 40—“team leaders” specializing in casting, calendering, boudinage, and remoulding. Africans are implicitly excluded from consideration, as they are not considered sufficiently competent to direct others. The racial prejudices of the metropole are reproduced in the postcolony: as a state-within-a-state, the rubber factory is able to exclude Africans from certain positions, staking a claim to sovereignty even in post-independence Côte d’Ivoire. The protagonist experiences this process of exclusion firsthand when he is curtly informed that a French company, whether on European or African soil, “is not a souk” but a “private enterprise” that an African “cannot just enter.”

In tackling the racist and ageist underpinnings of employment discrimination, Hondo deliberately punctures the cherished myth of colorblind France. Taking their cues from the rosy recollections of Black American GIs for whom cosmopolitan Paris seemed, in the mid-1940s, a far cry from the Jim Crow South, historians of the Second World War have tended to offer cheerful stories of “Mississippi Negroes” walking arm in arm with white women and even kissing them along the banks of the Seine, apparently without raising a single eyebrow. Hondo tells a far darker story, one that is powerfully attuned to the painful complexities of the relationship between France and its current and former African colonies. It was one thing for the French to accept (if indeed they did) the Black American servicemen who represented but a small percentage of the U.S. armed forces, their time in the country perceived as temporary and rendered further appealing in the immediate glow of liberation from Nazi control. But it was quite another for them to accept the hundreds of thousands of African-born refugees and other migrants of color hoping to put down permanent roots in France.

Soleil Ô implies that the interracial situation was far more complicated in newly liberated France, and it had certainly become so by the late 1960s, a time of reactionary backlash (what the exiled Tunisian activist Sadri Khiari has called “the colonial counter-revolution”). Hondo’s is not a straightforward revisionist history. But neither is it unreadably “postmodern”—untethered to (or uninterested in) verifiable historical realities.