FANON Yesterday, Today
Film screening and conversation with Hassane Mezine, Samir Gandesha and Glen Coulthard.
Hassane Mezine, FANON Yesterday, Today, Algeria/France, 2019, 87 min, English subtitles.
Who was Frantz Fanon and what is his legacy today? In his film FANON Yesterday, Today, Hassane Mezine gives voice to men and women who knew and shared with the flint warrior, according to Aimé Césaire’s beautiful formulation, privileged moments during the struggle but also in a family and friendly context. Fanon died in December 1961 but his reflection irrigated numerous revolutionary fields throughout the world.
What view of this thinker and action man, have those who continue the fight today on different fronts against injustice and arbitrariness? The director takes the viewer on a journey, from the homeland to the hubs of political and social struggles passing through the land where he rests. North and South of the world, activists talk of their struggle and reflect on their rapports with Frantz Fanon. The transmission is thus established between the historical dimension and the diverse contemporary spaces swept by the Fanonian breath.
The film screening is followed by a conversation of the filmmaker with Samir Gandesha and Glen Coulthard.
Hassane Mezine is a director, professional photographer and educator in digital photography and multimedia. In 2004 he participated in shooting the movie Algérie Tours/Détours by Leïla Morouche and Oriane Brun-Moschetti, and in the company of the anti-colonial filmmaker René Vautier. In 2016 he worked as director of photography for Delou, a TV series in 52 episodes made in Niger in Hausa language by Souleymane Mahamane. Mazine’s film Fanon Yesterday, Today has been invited to film festivals worldwide and was awarded the prize for Best Screenplay at Festival Santiago Alvarez, Santiago de Cuba (2019).
Samir Gandesha is currently Associate Professor in the Department of the Humanities and the Director of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He specializes in modern European thought and culture, with a particular emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. He is co-editor with Lars Rensmann of Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford, 2012), and co-editor with Johan Hartle of Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017) and Aesthetic Marx (Bloomsbury Press, 2017).
Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (2014) and winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book. He is a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh (Northwest Territories).