Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask [still], dir. Isaac Julien, 1996. 73 min.
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Join us for a screening of Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), followed by a conversation between the film’s director, Sir Isaac Julien, and academic and writer Françoise Vergès, who contributed to the film’s production, research and translation.
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask is a poetic meditation on the life, work and enduring influence of the anti-colonial thinker and philosopher Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Masks. Through interviews, archival footage and reconstructed scenes, the film traces Fanon’s journey from his early years in Martinique to his work as a psychiatrist and revolutionary in Algeria, exploring the continued relevance of his ideas to contemporary struggles against colonialism, racism and systemic violence.
“The wound is the cruelty of the colonial and racial world. Its determination to destroy everything and to create ugliness everywhere is a way of life. To be in joy is to gather and laugh together. I love to cook for many people. I ask myself each time, how can we remove the poison poured into our bodies and minds? What are our antidotes, how to let those circulate? Against isolation, sitting with friends. Against emptiness, reading poetry. Against melancholy, playing with children. For every poison, an antidote.”
— Françoise Vergès, Another Sun (Divided Publishing, 2026)
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask is a poetic meditation on the life, work and enduring influence of the anti-colonial thinker and philosopher Frantz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Masks. Through interviews, archival footage and reconstructed scenes, the film traces Fanon’s journey from his early years in Martinique to his work as a psychiatrist and revolutionary in Algeria, exploring the continued relevance of his ideas to contemporary struggles against colonialism, racism and systemic violence.
“The wound is the cruelty of the colonial and racial world. Its determination to destroy everything and to create ugliness everywhere is a way of life. To be in joy is to gather and laugh together. I love to cook for many people. I ask myself each time, how can we remove the poison poured into our bodies and minds? What are our antidotes, how to let those circulate? Against isolation, sitting with friends. Against emptiness, reading poetry. Against melancholy, playing with children. For every poison, an antidote.”
— Françoise Vergès, Another Sun (Divided Publishing, 2026)
Bios
Sir Isaac Julien, RA (born 1960) is a critically acclaimed British artist and filmmaker. In 2018, Julien joined the faculty at the University of California Santa Cruz where he is a Distinguished Professor of the Arts and leads the Moving Image Lab together with Arts Professor Mark Nash.
Current and recent international solo exhibitions include Museum Dreams, gres art 671, Bergamo, All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, Palazzo te, Mantua, Italy; Isaac Julien: I Dream a World, de Young Museum, San Francisco, USA; Isaac Julien: A Marvellous Entanglement, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, Brazil; Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, 2024; Isaac Julien: What Freedom is to Me, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands, 2024; K21, Dusseldorf, Germany, 2023; Tate Britain, London, UK, 2023; Lina Bo Bardi, A Marvellous Entanglement, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA, 2023; Lessons of the Hour, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Virginia USA, 2022-23; Once Again… (Statues Never Die), Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, USA, 2022.
Julien is the recipient of The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award 2017, and a Kaiserring Goslar Award in 2022. He was granted a knighthood as part of the Queen’s Honours List in 2022.
Françoise Vergès is a writer, decolonial anti-racist feminist and curator. She is currently working on the fabrication of premature death, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the colonial roots of fascism, private property and racism. In parallel, she is working on a film about communist anti-colonial struggles on Réunion and in the Southwest Indian Ocean based on her parents’ personal archives and her own. Her recent publications include: Another Sun (with Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro, 2026) Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (2024); A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2024); A Decolonial Feminism (2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (2020); and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (2019). She has written documentary films on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire (both 2013) and was a project advisor for Documenta11 (2002) and La Triennale de Paris (2012).
Vergès is currently senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London.
Presented with Divided Publishing and the Isaac Julien Studio.
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Thu, 02 Jul 2026
Cinema 1
06:30 pm
Ticket information
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Access information
Cinema 1
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