So the last movie in this many-way tie at #152 is a 1979 movie from Med Hondo, but it’s very likely you’ve never seen it. It was unavailable on home video for a long time; a restoration was completed a few years ago, and it went around to film festivals in 2023-2024. It’s still not on any streaming service, and the only disc version is a 2023 French import (which does play in a Region A player and has English subtitles). With that kind of unavailability, it’s kind of a miracle this is on the list at all, and I suspect it might be due to Barry Jenkins championing it.

I also suspect that with greater availability, it’s likely to place higher on the list in 2032. Because this is exactly the kind of movie that would appeal to the critics who vote on this list: It’s absolutely unlike anything else you’ve ever seen, sharply formal, and brutally satirical.

It’s an adaptation of a play, and it feels stagey. The entire movie is set on a fake ship constructed in an empty factory building, with scenes playing out in different parts of the ship, with small set decorations (lights and posters and furniture) evoking everything from a Parisian square to… well, a slave ship.

The story it’s telling is the history of French colonialism of the West Indies over the centuries. Its characters are all archetypes: We start off with a ruling council of five people: A white man in charge representing the government, a white man representing business, a white man representing the Church, a white woman who is a “social worker,” and then a Black man representing the colonial governor of the island. They talk about how the population is growing unmanageable, and they need to follow The Plan and push people to emigrate to France.

What follows is a free-wheeling history of French colonialism, skipping around in time. There are bits about the rise of sugar plantations, about the French Revolution and its back-and-forth on the legality of slavery, emigration of islanders to France and the racism they experienced there, all interwoven non-chronologically but seamlessly. The characters change outfits for the different time periods, but are played by the same actors, symbolizing a continuity of history.

The movie is strongly pro-revolutionary, and satirizes pretty much everything else. It mocks those who try to vote in a rigged system, it satirizes Parisian leftists (with a brief dramatized dead-on squabble between three different factions of leftist, all of whom have only an academic and theoretical interest in the Black islanders), it satirizes capitalists (who argue amongst themselves about whether the poor Black emigres are good to have as cheap labor or unpleasant and rowdy), it satirizes the church and the lofty ideals of a government that fails to live up to them, it satirizes assimilationists and those who look to the courts for protection.

And it’s doing all this, I should add, in the loose form of a musical. Dialogue is typically poetic in nature, there’s music throughout, and major scenes take place as dance numbers.

It is, obviously, didactic as hell — there’s no subtle undercurrents here, there’s little nuance, it’s stridently (though with almost as much humor as anger) arguing a point and sending a message. But it’s made with such skill and artistry that it’s of more than just political interest.