Gabriel Glissant

The film Soleil Ô, shot over four years with a very low budget, tells the story of a black immigrant who makes his way to Paris in search of “his Gaul ancestors”. This manifesto denounces a new form of slavery: The immigrants desperately seek work, a place to live, but find themselves face to face with indifference, rejection, humiliation…until the final call for uprising. “Soleil Ô” is the title of a West Indian song that tells of the pain of the black people from Dahomey (now Benin) who were taken to the Caribbean as slaves.

Aboard a giant slave ship in an abandoned Citroën factory, the history of the West Indies is traced through several centuries of French oppression. The ship becomes a stage for the people to tell stories via song and dance—from their enslavement to their displacement in Metropolitan France.

For 'Et les chiens se taisaient' Maldoror adapted a piece of theatre by the poet and politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), about a rebel who becomes profoundly aware of his otherness when condemned to death. His existential dialogue with his mother reverberates around the African sculptures on display at the Musée de l'Homme, a Parisian museum full of colonial plunder whose director was the Surrealist anthropologist Michel Leiris.

Taken during the filming of "West Indies," this film shows the making of the monumental set in the middle of the former Citroën factory, as well as backstage activity and rehearsals on the set.

A French TV movie directed by Jean-Christophe Averty , broadcast on December 24, 1964 . The Old Testament set in Louisiana with an all black cast.