Mayworks Festival: True Chronicles (2024) Screening

True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956, A film by Abdenour Zahzah: Set in French-ruled Algeria in the 1950s, before he was renowned as one of the most influential thinkers and contributors to postcolonial philosophy, Frantz Fanon was a trained psychiatrist. In his recently appointed position as head physician at the Blida-Joinville Hospital, a young Fanon witnesses the racist and Islamaphobic cruelty the hospital’s patients endured, becoming a formative experience in his own worldview. Depicting revolution in its micros and macros, his advocacy leads him to set up a café, a newspaper for patients, and community sports while the Algerian War of Independence brews outside the hospital walls. Filmed in the same hospital where Fanon once worked, the film explores this short but impactful chapter of his life using archival records and Fanon’s hospital diaries.

This venue is wheelchair accessible and has gender neutral, wheelchair accessible washrooms. For requests, please email [email protected]

Mayworks Festival is a community-based festival which annually presents new works by a diverse and broad range of artists, who are both workers and activists. The programming presents bold, insightful, responses to pressing issues at the intersection of art, social justice and labour. .

The Caribbean Solidarity Network (CSN) is an organization committed to the principles of Caribbean Liberation and Unity across the region as well as throughout the Diaspora. CSN’s platform is one rooted in a feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial struggle. The history of the Caribbean peoples has always been one of freedom and self-determination. CSN offers space for the Caribbean community and invested allies to foment ideas and build collective knowledge and understanding about present and local circumstances. Learn More.

The University of Toronto New College's Community Engaged Learning is a placement-based program for students to work in social service or community sector.

Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto is an interdisciplinary program engaging Caribbean history and society, politics and economic development, literature and thought.

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