The late Mauritanian-French writer-director-producer Med Hondo was a trailblazer in making independent films that featured the lives of African immigrants in Europe and denounced all forms of oppression. His first feature Soleil Ô, self-financed and shot over three years in the aftermath of May 68 with a cast of African and West Indian actors, fol- lows the fortunes of an African immigrant in Paris as he faces racism in the workplace, objectification in the bedroom, and indifference on the part of better-off Africans. Hondo was inspired to make the film by a deadly fire in a migrant shelter outside Paris. He stated: “I needed to give [the victims] a voice, bodies, to show who these people were and how they lived, sometimes in inhuman conditions, in the shadow of neo-colonialism. […] I had a fierce desire to be a witness to my time and to proclaim my existence as an African.” Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Soleil Ô is that while it pulls no punches in delivering its withering verdict on the effects of colonial history, it is anything but dour: acerbically funny, deliriously theatrical, and vibrantly inventive in its formal conceits, this is a work of resistance lifted by the joy of artistic expression.