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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FRANTZ FANON’S ALGERIAN YEARS ON FILM  
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An interview with Jean-Claude Barny
April 7, 2025
Jacobin
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_ In French-ruled Algeria, Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist and an
active member of the National Liberation Front. A new movie portrays
his commitment to the anti-colonial struggle. _

Still from Fanon. , (Special Touch Studios, WebSpider Productions)

 

Behind a locked door, whimpers and moans can be heard over an ominous
soundtrack. Dressed in a white lab coat and tan suit, Frantz Fanon is
about to encounter, for the first time, the patients of the
psychiatric ward of colonial Algeria’s Blida-Joinville hospital.

The next scene is dark — both cinematographically and
psychologically. The room Fanon enters looks more like a prison or
torture center than a mental asylum. Some of the patients, crammed
into the psych ward like livestock, are strapped into straitjackets;
others have their ankles and wrists chained to the walls. After a long
moment, Fanon looks to the medical intern giving him the tour. He
sternly commands him to fetch the keys to unchain them all. In the
next scene, the patients are released into the blinding sun of the
courtyard, a neat contrast of light and darkness.

On display in these scenes is the peculiar cinematic universe
of _Fanon_ — the creation of Jean-Claude Barny, a French filmmaker
of Guadeloupean and Trinidadian descent. The movie was released in
France (including Fanon’s own Martinique, now a French
overseas _département_), Belgium, Luxembourg, and eighteen
French-speaking countries across Africa last Wednesday, April 2, and
will be released in Canada in October.

Barny’s _Fanon_ doesn’t subscribe to typical cinematic codes. As
the director tells _Jacobin_, it’s a biopic that “doesn’t go
from A to Z, but rather starts somewhere around C.” “_Fanon_,”
Barny added, is an “arthouse film for the general public.”

For Fanon, Algeria was a time of political awakening and intellectual
liberation.

Such an approach might be what was necessary to capture the
complexities of the film’s subject: the three-year period between
1953 and January 1957 when Fanon, then a young but ambitious
psychiatrist from the French colony of Martinique, served as a
clinical department head at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital
in Algeria. This period — which came just after the publication of
his thesis on colonial alienation in _Black Skin, White Masks_ —
coincided with some of the writing of what would later become his
best-known book, _The Wretched of the Earth_, and the apogee of his
personal involvement in anti-colonial guerrilla movements as a freedom
fighter connected to Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN).

For Fanon, Algeria was a time of political awakening and intellectual
liberation. Increasingly, however, his dual role of
clinician-revolutionary tortured the psychiatrist: a tension that
builds throughout the film. In 1957, Fanon was forced into exile in
Tunisia, where he became a spokesperson for the FLN across the African
continent. While Algeria’s anti-colonial guerrilla movement would
ultimately succeed with the signing of the Évian Accords of March
1962, which led to independence, Fanon did not get to see the final
outcome. The physician died from leukemia in a hospital bed in
Bethesda’s Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in December
1961.

In zooming in on those pivotal years leading up to Fanon’s exile —
years that informed Fanon’s anti-colonial thesis and his emphasis on
the need for armed struggle — Barny’s _Fanon_ shines a necessary
light on one of the world’s foremost postcolonial thinkers, one who,
a hundred years after his birth in Martinique, continues to inspire.

Phineas Rueckert spoke with director Barny in a house not far from
where he grew up in Paris’s northeastern suburbs.

Phineas Rueckert

You are of Guadeloupean and Trinidadian origin but grew up in the
Paris suburbs. What did Fanon mean to you growing up? Were you
particularly aware of him?

 

Jean-Claude Barny

Paradoxically, no, I didn’t grow up with Fanon. That is to say, I
was not born with Fanon in my hands. I wasn’t born with a Fanonesque
culture in my mind. I grew up in a period called the “Thirty
Glorious Years,” a time [of economic growth in post-1945 France]
that marked the end of assimilation and the beginning of integration.
So, I grew up in a unique historical context, in which France was
[omnipresent] and everything that was linked to my heritage, my
culture, was totally ostracized.

In 1957, Fanon was forced into exile in Tunisia, where he became a
spokesperson for Algeria’s National Liberation Front across the
African continent.

But I had a mother who was undoubtedly in tune with her time: the
feminist struggles of the 1960s and ’70s, the antidiscrimination
movements in the United States, which had a huge influence on the
Caribbean. It was music before literature that brought this about:
James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, [Bob] Marley. They took
over from the literary intellectuals of the 1950s and music
[radicalized] my mother, set the tone for resistance.

Phineas Rueckert

When did Fanon first appear in your life, then?

Jean-Claude Barny

I was sixteen years old when I picked up _Black Skin, White Masks_. I
was growing up in a multicultural suburb where there were real
questions about who we are, where we are going and how to design
society. When I discovered _Black Skin, White Masks_, I was a young
man in the midst of emancipation, in the midst of reflection on these
subjects. At the same time, there was an [American TV] series
— _Roots_ — that hit us like a ton of bricks. At school, this
was a big deal, in terms of the fact that there could be black people
on screen. Even if they weren’t the most radiant, they were there.
When I read Fanon and I saw that we were invisible [in pop culture], I
said to myself, “There’s something wrong, there’s a blatant
erasure of [black people].”

Phineas Rueckert

_Fanon_ is your third feature film after _Nèg maron_ (2005)
and _Le Gang des Antillais_ (2016). Were the themes that emerge
in _Fanon _already present in those films?

Jean-Claude Barny

The first films you make always feels like a necessity. You have
things to settle with yourself and with the social structure in which
you live. I think that _Nèg maron_ and _Le Gang des
Antillais_ were, for me, the building blocks of what I would produce
in the future. I was building myself as a director, as a filmmaker, as
an artist. I was polishing my skills so that when I would tackle
Fanon, I wouldn’t miss the mark.

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Still from Fanon. (Special Touch Studios, WebSpider Productions)

Intellectually, Fanon’s a monster. And so, I told myself that the
film has to live up to this man. At the same time, I have to be able
to offer something different than most biopics. For me, _Nèg
maron_ and _Le Gang _and my other productions — including [the
series] _Bitter Tropics_ or [telefilm] _Rose and the Soldier_ —
were projects that allowed me to establish my legitimacy. If I
hadn’t made all those films in the past and I tried to make Fanon
today, people would look at me with suspicion, and rightly so. But the
other films I’ve made give me the standing to tackle Fanon.

Phineas Rueckert

Let’s talk about the film itself, which really focuses on the three
years Fanon spent in Algeria. What do you want people to take away
from the film and why focus on that time period in particular?

Jean-Claude Barny

The aim was to take Fanon’s writing and make it digestible. My job,
as a director, is to bring these themes into emotions through images,
sound, and music. I have lots of tools to make that happen in a way
that is digestible. I have actors, I have dialogues, I have sets, I
have costumes, I have music, I have action, I have light, I have
movement, I have a camera. So, I can put all that to work. Fanon’s
turn of phrase suddenly becomes something that moves. So that’s
what’s in the film: it’s really the words of the book _The
Wretched of the Earth_. It’s a journey inside this book in two hours
and seventeen minutes.

I wanted the film to get into Fanon’s psyche.

I wasn’t interested in making a biopic that went from Fanon’s
birth to his death. For me, richness is when you give yourself the
means to go against everything that the industry imposes on you: to
spend more time than usual, [adapt] a structure that doesn’t go from
A to Z but C to Z, [work with] actors who are not used to working
together, sets that are not necessarily realistic, but rather
symbolic. I wanted the film to get into Fanon’s psyche. A psyche is
something immaterial, abstract. The idea was to allow the film, beyond
its historical realism, to leave the door open for us to interpret the
alienation of Fanon’s own psyche and that of the people he consults.

 

Phineas Rueckert

So, what were Fanon’s internal tensions and how do you show that in
the film?

Jean-Claude Barny

We decided to really show this through the lens of the psychiatric
hospital. This really was his battlefield. Fanon was first and
foremost a psychiatrist. The idea of alienation already existed in the
field of psychiatry; what Fanon did was shift this from the individual
to the society. How is a person’s psyche disrupted when conditions
that demean, discredit, and disempower them are forcibly inflicted?
Fanon decided to make the hospital the testing ground for racism and
discrimination.

[He started from] the observation that colonization is the
manipulation by those who want to acquire wealth of those deemed
“incapable” of developing it. Fanon, like many others, explained
this situation very clearly. But where he was innovative was that he
also said that “the colonizer will never be able to free himself
from the colonized, because the two are linked.” The two are caught
in a dependent relationship and they will never be able to detach
themselves from one another if only one is trying to. This will only
happen when they start working together and recognize one another,
understand the madness they are caught up in.

Phineas Rueckert

We talk a lot about Fanon as a revolutionary, as an anti-colonial
thinker, as a rebel, but what is Fanon’s legacy as a practitioner of
psychiatry? Is this legacy still alive?

Jean-Claude Barny

When I look at the feedback from psychiatrists who have talked to me
about the film, there is a current of psychiatrists who have always
studied Fanon’s psychiatric observations. It’s not the predominant
academic study of psychiatry but a school of thought for the curious.
Without being an expert on the subject, I would say, yes, indeed,
there are many psychiatrists today who are increasingly returning to
the study of Fanon — no longer as an outlier, or a curiosity, but
really as someone who had a scientific approach, someone who laid down
a scientific foundation for working with the mentally ill.

Phineas Rueckert

I have the impression that, for lack of a better word, Fanon is really
“fashionable” right now. There was a successful book published
recently — Adam Shatz’s _The Rebel’s Clini_c — there’s your
film, there are reprints of Fanon’s work coming out. Why this
interest in Fanon at this particular moment in time, apart from the
fact that it’s a hundred years since he was born, of course? What
explains it?

Jean-Claude Barny

It’s very hard to say. It would be naive to say it’s random. I
believe that all of us who are coming together today for this
centenary and who have all contributed in some way, have been
preparing for some time, if subconsciously. I’ve been working on
this film for seven years. It’s as if we [who study Fanon] had a
maturation period of forty years, and we are finally meeting at the
same time. This corresponds to the time when we all read Fanon, when
all of us were shocked by Fanon and since then we had to continue to
nourish ourselves, to learn, to gain humility and knowledge. There
were of course a lot of people ahead of us.

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Still from Fanon. (Special Touch Studios, WebSpider Productions)

There are lots of books on Fanon: these people left behind a treasure
trove for us. So maybe they’re visionaries too, but they didn’t
have the same timing. In the coming weeks, it may be the first time in
history that the face of Fanon will adorn the walls of the Paris
metro. That, for me, is the first success of the film: millions of
people who take the metro will look at this man, who was totally
ostracized, trivialized, treated like a pariah, and wonder who he was.

 

Phineas Rueckert

Switching gears, I wanted to speak a little bit about Algeria, where
the film takes place. Relations between France and Algeria are, to say
the least, a little feverish at the time this movie is coming out. Can
you talk a little about what this film also says about the colonial
relationship between France and Algeria? Do you think the film could
be another source of tension, or, inversely, that it could in some way
contribute to the calming of these tensions?

Jean-Claude Barny

The film isn’t going to resolve anything at that level. The wound
between France and Algeria is so deep on both sides that if there’s
no will to close it, there’s always someone who’s going to add
fuel to the fire. It’s like a bad divorce, a divorce where one of
the parties doesn’t acknowledge their faults. This feeling is
largely maintained by the children of the _pieds noirs _[French
colonists in Algeria].

The film’s release may be the first time in history that the face of
Fanon will adorn the walls of the Paris metro.

The average French citizen has nothing against Algeria. To them, it is
a country that was once a colony. Today the tensions between Algeria
and France are not a fact of citizenship; they are a political fact,
and this political fact is upheld by nostalgia that has its source in
the _pieds noirs_, who, for the most part, have not accepted the fact
that they were thrown out. There was a kind of violent falling out of
love, which means that today they are embittered by a place where they
once felt legitimate, loved, and, above all, at ease.

Phineas Rueckert

You were unable to shoot this film in Algeria and therefore you shot
it in Tunisia instead. Why? What happened?

Jean-Claude Barny

I did practically three years of location scouting. I went to Algeria,
I went to Blida [the hospital in Algiers where Fanon was a
practitioner]. I was in Frantz Fanon’s office. I did a lot of
process work so as not to be short of information when I went to work
with my actors and technicians. I had to have an answer to everything.
So, I worked hard for three or four years to be as informed, as
well-rounded, and as legitimate as possible.

But when it came down to filming, we had a major insurance problem. We
didn’t know how to validate our insurance policies to allow us to
film safely in Algeria, so the brother country — Tunisia — invited
us to replace some of the shots. So, it’s really, simply, because
the filming conditions were more suitable for our insurance in
Tunisia. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that the two
countries collaborated so that we could make the best film possible.

Phineas Rueckert

The movie was released in France on April 2. Will it be released in
other countries?

Jean-Claude Barny

That’s a good question because that’s where you see that Fanon is
a global phenomenon. It seems naive, but I’m surprised when people
from Brazil send messages to me in France to ask me how and where they
can see the film. This tells me that there are people around the world
who want to see this film. It will be released in Belgium, Luxembourg,
Canada, and more than a dozen African countries. It’s not Fanon
who’s staying in France. It’s Fanon who is going on a world tour.

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Contributors

Jean-Claude Barny is a film director. His works include Nèg
maron, Le Gang des Antillais and Fanon.

Phineas Rueckert is a Paris-based journalist. His writing has appeared
in Vice and Next City.

 

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* Algeria
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* France
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* Frantz Fanon
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* colonialism
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* mental health
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