Tribute to Frantz Fanon

One hundred years after the birth of Frantz Fanon, Algerian director Abdenour Zahzah’s film revisits the crucial years when the young psychiatrist was director of the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in French Algeria. In 1953, Fanon sought to treat the alienation of Algerian patients, but the outbreak of the war of independence soon reached the wards. Shot entirely in the same hospital, Zahzah’s film sheds light on the origins of Fanon’s anti-colonial commitment, later crystallized in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Following the screening at the DIG venue, Pier Paolo Ascari, professor of Aesthetics at the University of Bologna, and sociologist Luca Negrogno will discuss Fanon’s political, cultural, and psychiatric legacy.