West Indies: The movie Barry Jenkins calls a “vital masterpiece”
BFI’s Sight and Sound magazine has recently released its decennial greatest films of all time list, crowning Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde feminist film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles champion. To coincide with the poll’s release, Sight and Sound has shared lists created by respected filmmakers which detail their picks of the best movies ever made.
The magazine has asked a wide array of directors, from horror genius John Carpenter to cinematic provocateur Gasper Noé, to provide their picks. However, several directors whose films made it onto Sight and Sound’s final list also shared their choices, such as Barry Jenkins.
The filmmaker’s 2016 masterpiece Moonlight is a coming-of-age drama following the main character, Chiron, through childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Jenkins intersects masculinity, blackness and sexuality to create a beautiful meditation on identity. A distinctive colour palette emphasises the film’s themes, such as blue highlighting Chiron’s vulnerability and sensitivity and yellow signalling uneasiness. Moonlight took home the Best Picture award at the 2017 Academy Awards, alongside Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Mahershala Ali.
Since directing Moonlight, Jenkins has adapted James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk and directed the 2021 miniseries The Underground Railroad. In Jenkin’s list of the greatest films ever made, several of his picks appear alongside Moonlight in Sound and Sight’s official list, such as Beau travail, which he describes as “truly sensorial cinema” and Taxi Driver, “lithe and lethal, a nihilistic symphony for the city of dreams.” However, he calls one film on his list, which is absent from Sight and Sound‘s ranking, “a vital masterpiece” – West Indies by Med Hondo.
The Algerian-Mauritanian French-language drama was released in 1979 and is widely regarded as a milestone in African cinema. Created on a budget of $1.35 million, the film is one of the most expensive African films ever made. West Indies is a scathing musical, offering a witty yet angered view of West Indian history through its several centuries of French oppression. The film is set on a slave ship and uses an inventive and seamless visual style. Hondo’s exploration of slavery and colonialism is infinitely poignant, yet it remains a severely underrated piece of cinema. Jenkins described the film as “Cinema as action, a vital masterpiece of verve and invention”.
In 1979, Hondo penned an essay that argued for the greater visibility of cinema made by and for African people, typically excluded from the mainstream. He explained: “Throughout the world, when people use the term cinema, they all refer more or less consciously to a single cinema, which for more than half a century has been created, produced, industrialised, programmed and then shown on the world’s screens: Euro-American cinema.”
In creating West Indies, Hondo desired to “free the very concept of musical comedy from its American trade mark. I wanted to show that each people on earth has its own musical comedy, its own musical tragedy and its own thought shaped through its own history.”
Watch a clip from West Indies below.
