Critics reviews

[Oh, Sun] announces the arrival of a maverick director intent on taking on the very form of the medium... This is a film that immediately partakes in the modernist pantheon of the cinema.

[A] groundbreaking feature debut... Soleil Ô was intended as a form of self-therapy, a way for Hondo to expose the vampiric racism that was destroying his own life, to exorcise the effects of that cancer on an individual and collective body. It is a film whose entire project rests on the impossible encounter between the gaze of the (formerly) colonized and that of the (former) colonizer.

A combination of pure documentary and improvisation, the film lacks a conventional plot but offers instead many gripping scenes—none more so than a series of horrified reaction shots from ordinary Parisians on seeing Liensol and a blonde (Michèle Perello) canoodling on the Champs-Élysées.

Hondo does not pull his punches. The movie is not only a bitter firsthand analysis of economic migration but also a similarly cutting critique of systemic white supremacy. Half a century has scarcely blunted — and may have even enhanced — its relevance.

Hondo’s approach to the immigrant experience in Soleil Ô is ferocious... [His] intention was to make a nameless individual’s experience a collective one. His triumphant endeavor is a must-see.

Hondo’s passionate, wide-ranging voice-over commentary, addressing the hero in the second person, blends confession and observation, aspiration and despair, societal and personal conflicts.

The style [Hondo] developed in Soleil Ô was taut, anxious, and forged under pressure. Cuts come sharp and fierce; mobile street footage, direct-to-camera interviews, expository dialogue scenes, and passages of steady observation alternate with setpieces in which the camera veers and swerves around its subjects at discomfitingly close range.

Soleil O resembles a manifesto, scrappily shot across four years and suffused with a political indignation that, despite the film’s historical specificity, still feels urgent today.

Med Hondo makes a pitiable and often dramatic outcry even if his dramatization of injustices is open-ended and inconclusive... [Still, the director,] whose imagery tends to be arty and disjointed, has given us a drama that remains disturbingly vivid.