Mohamed Abid Medoun "Med" Hondo (May 4, 1936 - March 2, 2019) was a Mauritanian-French film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and voice actor.
He emigrated to France in 1959 and began to work in film in the 1960s. His style was experimental, combining a variety of literary and documentary techniques to expose the racism, oppression and alienation faced by African and Arab immigrants in the post-colonial world. Not satisfied with Africa's seemingly underdeveloped cinematic catalogue, he wanted to demysitfy and challenge pre existing African and Hollywood traditions to raise consciousness on Third World cinema.
He was also a very prolific and well known voice actor in France. Most notably, he dubbed a number of roles of African-American actors such as Eddie Murphy (including Axel Foley in the Beverly Hills Cop series and Prince Akeem in Coming to America), Morgan Freeman (shared with Benoît Allemane), Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed in the Rocky films), Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddemore in Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II), Keith David and Paul Winfield. Animated characters he dubbed included Rafiki in The Lion King and Donkey in Shrek.
He passed away at the age of 82 on March 2, 2019.
Filmography
- Soleil O (1967)
- Les bicots-Nègres vos voisins (1974)
- Sahel la faim pourquoi (1975)
- Nous aurons toute la mort pour dormir (1977)
- West Indies (1979)
- Sarraounia (1986)
- Lumière noire (1994)
- Watani, un monde sans mal (1998)
- Fatima, l'Algérienne de Dakar (2004)
