Ebony (2017)

Eight minutes. That's all Mauritius gets. And honestly? It's both the best and worst thing about Ebony.

I came to this one through my A-Z World Movie Tour, which has been sending me down all sorts of unexpected rabbit holes, and Mauritius was always going to be a tricky one to tick off the list. When I found Ebony, a short documentary covering the island's entire history from pre-history through to independence, I wasn't expecting much. What I got was a genuinely enjoyable little watch that left me wanting considerably more.

Let me be clear about what this is: it's essentially a compressed history lesson, and a pretty good one at that. You move through the Dutch discovery of the island, French and then English colonial rule, and finally the road to independence, all in the space of a few minutes. Alongside that you get a decent look at the flora and fauna of the islands, because Mauritius is one of those places where the natural world is as much a part of the story as the human history. The narration is clean and well-paced, and it carries you through without ever feeling like a dry school textbook read aloud.

And the landscapes. I wasn't prepared for how beautiful they'd be. There's something almost unfair about a place that looks like Mauritius. The footage does proper justice to it, and there were a few moments where I just sat back and thought, right, I need to go there. That's no small achievement for something running under ten minutes.

But here's the thing: eight minutes is nowhere near enough. The history of Mauritius is genuinely fascinating. The island was uninhabited before European arrival, it became a crucial stopping point for trade routes, it's got layers of colonial history, a remarkable ethnic and cultural mix, and a story of independence that deserves real attention. Ebony skims over all of it. Not badly, but it skims. You're just starting to get your teeth into something when it moves on. The Dutch barely get a look in. The French period gets a sentence or two. Independence arrives almost before you've registered the British were even there.

It reminded me a bit of watching Letter from Siberia (1957), where the joy of the thing is partly in how a place is presented to you, how you're invited to see somewhere through a particular lens. Ebony has that same sense of a filmmaker genuinely wanting to show you something worth seeing. The difference is that Marker had the time to build a real argument. Ebony doesn't have the runway.

I think that's what's slightly frustrating here. There's clearly care behind this. The production isn't flashy but it's competent, the narration is considered, and whoever put this together had a genuine affection for the subject. It feels like a trailer for a longer documentary that doesn't exist, or maybe the opening chapter of something that never got made. As a brief introduction to Mauritius, it absolutely works. As a complete picture of the island and its history, it can't help but fall short.

Worth noting too: as of writing, this is the first review of Ebony on Letterboxd. Which tells you something about how hard it is to find Mauritian cinema. If this short film is the entry point for most people into Mauritius on screen, I hope it at least sends them off to read more. It sent me down a Wikipedia hole for about half an hour, which is probably the highest compliment I can give a piece of educational filmmaking.

Three stars. Short, sweet, genuinely lovely to look at, and over far too quickly. A good watch, just not nearly enough of one.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2025-07-16

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