by Hudson Moura
Jean-Claude Barny’s Fanon is not a conventional cradle-to-grave biopic; it is a tightly framed portrait of Frantz Fanon (Alexandre Bouyer) at a decisive historical and intellectual juncture: his years as a psychiatrist in French-occupied Algeria and his progressive alignment with the FLN. The focus is precise—sometimes productively, sometimes frustratingly so. Viewers expecting a full trajectory from Martinique to Peau noire, masques blancs to Les damnés de la terre will instead find a chamber piece set in hospital wards, administrative offices, and clandestine meetings, where Fanon’s medical practice and political thought become inseparable.
The film opens with Fanon and his wife Josie (Déborah François) arriving in Algeria to take up a post in a psychiatric hospital. Early scenes are among the strongest: Fanon orders chained patients released; his superior promptly rebukes him, insisting that “North Africans” are violent, primitive, anatomically deficient—an efficient distillation of colonial psychiatry. Fanon’s retort—“They are men like you and me”—carries extra charge when the director wonders whether he “should have stayed in his place in the West Indies.” Barny stages the hospital as a microcosm of the colonial order: a segregated architecture where diagnostic categories, security protocols, and everyday humiliations reproduce the racialized hierarchy outside. Here the film is at its clearest: Fanon’s ward rounds are also political education.
Throughout, long stretches of voiceover draw directly on Fanon’s texts. Passages on permanent tension, presumed guilt, racist “science,” the muscles of the colonized “always tensed,” are laid over images of searches, interrogations, and fractured bodies. This strategy has force: it links dense theory to concrete situations and reminds us that Les damnés de la terre was not written from abstraction but from clinic notes and police files. Likewise, Fanon’s rebuke to a colleague—who parrots the language of “terrorists”—neatly repositions the vocabulary of resistance: “The Germans talked about terrorists too. We talked about the Resistance.” The film is at its best when it lets these correspondences emerge cleanly, without over-explaining.
Yet Barny’s reliance on direct quotation and reverent staging is also where Fanon stumbles. The performance style is often overwrought, particularly in scenes that would benefit from quiet observation rather than emphatic declamation. Ordinary exchanges are played at a constant high pitch, as if the actors must match the gravitas of the voiceover line for line. The result can feel didactic: instead of dramatizing how Fanon’s ideas emerge through practice, the film frequently pauses to illustrate the already-famous thesis. Josie, meanwhile, is reduced to a largely silent, supportive presence; her political and emotional life scarcely registers beyond loyal accompaniment.
Crucially, the title overpromises. Fanon suggests a comprehensive life; the film offers a single, though vital, chapter. We meet a man who has already written Black Skin, White Masks, already formulated key critiques of colonial alienation, and we follow him as he applies those insights to Algeria and moves toward open support for the FLN. The narrowing itself is not a flaw—it is refreshing, in principle, to treat a thinker through a specific conjuncture—but the screenplay does little to situate that conjuncture within the fuller arc of his militancy, and risks misleading viewers unfamiliar with the work.
Still, several sequences land with real power. Fanon’s insistence that psychiatric care must change its gaze—treating patients as subjects embedded in communities, not as racial types—is woven effectively through his clashes with colleagues. His resignation letter, delivered near the end, gathers the film’s ethical core: a refusal to legitimize “systematized dehumanization,” a commitment not to despair of humanity even while naming the colonial lie. In these moments, Barny manages something more than homage: he links institutional practice, political consciousness, and personal conscience in a way that feels earned.
As cinema, Fanon is earnest, uneven, and necessary. It too often confuses intensity with insight and leans on hagiographic framing where complexity would serve Fanon better. But it also reintroduces, to a broader audience, the radical clarity of a thinker who understood that madness, violence, and “criminality” in colonized societies cannot be read apart from the structures that produce them. If the film finally works more as an accessible gateway to Fanon’s texts than as a fully realized biographical drama, it is nonetheless a gateway worth having.
Rating: 4/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 