The restoration of power to people, the Arab spring, peaceful regime change, the Arab spring 2.0 or whatever might be the new nomenclature used or the latest twitter hashtags introduced, this transcendental need for a genuine experience of liberation continues to find its meaningful impulse in the life and writings of Frantz Fanon. The psychiatrist and anti-colonial theorist who, through his experiences with European anti-black racism and French colonialism in Algeria, has become the anti-colonial thinker and activist par excellence, in his time and ours.

In his first documentary, Fanon: yesterday, today, Hassane Mezine renews our attention to the historical and political project of freedom, humanism, and justice central to Fanon’s life and work. Mezine, a Franco-Algerian and a photographer by training, interweaves a polyvocal, at times conventional, view of Fanon’s life and work with an overlooked materialist analysis of Fanon’s legacy. His film offers a timely and sweeping re-presentation of Fanon’s philosophy and its contemporary relevance through a journey into the personal and political dimensions of his life, and the influence his ideas continue to have on new generations of readers and activists around the world.

Mezine’s documentary opens in an unexpected way, the voice of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, delivering his statement on the “tragedy of Africa” during his 2007 Dakar speech, highlighting that the racist and dehumanizing discourse of a neocolonial Europe is pervasive. To counter the degrading undertones of Sarkozy’s blatant attack, a succession of archival footage of chained bodies, mutilated corpses, and severed heads offers a visual emphasis on the terrible legacy of French colonialism in Algeria. This visual dissonance pre-empts Fanon’s intervention through an audio recording of his 1956 speech on “Racism and Culture,” and suggests Mezine’s interest in disrupting the continuity of neocolonial discourses and institutions through the use of Fanon’s philosophy of revolutionary struggle. Since discursive violence is the late performance of colonial physical violence, there is an urgency to re-appropriate Fanon’s critical, fightback commitments today.

For Mezine, Fanon is a timeless and relevant thinker and activist because his experience of racism and neocolonialism continues to shape how the African is viewed and framed. In the film, the subversive materiality of Fanon’s enduring legacy illuminates the present struggle against neocolonialism because it articulates violence, alienation, and discrimination as a material and political reality. To challenge the moral and political catastrophe, we still need Fanon’s humanism and fightback ideology.

Mezine’s documentary announces its methodology right from the title, the timelessness of Fanon’s work and legacy is presented through the recollections of those who encountered the Fanon of yesterday in Martinique, Algeria, Tunisia, and Mali, and also during our time through diasporic activists and writers, in Palestine, Portugal Unites States and Niger who continue to celebrate and live by his philosophy and ideals today. Fanon: yesterday, today juxtaposes conventional footage and selected readings from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth with an impressive number of diasporic encounters, which insist that Fanon’s liberation theory is timeless because we are still struggling with the same ideologies and structures of exclusion and dehumanization.