On Wednesday 19th August, @mothership.marrickville, Miya Miya Film Club presents: West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979) directed by Med Hondo.

Med Hondo remains a central figure in African cinema; a Mauritanian filmmaker whose work consistently challenged French colonial narratives and the structures that sustain them. Working between West Africa and France, his films confront the afterlives of empire, tracing how colonial power persists through language, labour, and image. Mauritanian cinema remains a rarely explored part of SWANA cultural history.

Set almost entirely on a single ship, West Indies is the first African musical, moving through centuries of Caribbean history without ever leaving its deck. The ship becomes everything at once. A slave vessel, a plantation, a factory, a nation. Time collapses. One moment folds into another, as histories overlap and echo across generations.

What Hondo builds is not a conventional narrative, but something closer to collective memory. Through song, movement, and repetition, the film traces the violences of French colonialism and the persistence of resistance across generations. Moments repeat, transform, and return.

The film is theatrical and deliberate. Performers move in cycles. Songs repeat. Gestures return. What emerges is a sense of history not as past, but as something ongoing, unresolved, and carried forward.

There is no outside. Only the ship, and the structures it contains. A space where control is enforced, but also where voices gather and resist.

On the night, food from West Africa and Mauritania will be shared.

Proceeds from the event will be donated to Youth and Hope, a Mauritania-based not-for-profit organisation that seeks to eliminate the barrier to education for rural Mauritanian students by providing school supplies and transportation stipends.

Your ticket includes a meal, drinks from @gazacola.au, a donation, as well as covering venue and projector hire, and film licencing.

The film will be screened in French with English subtitles.

Tickets on sale on July 15th.