Director: Ousmane Sembène, Senegal/France 1966, 70 mins, 12
Black Girl (Le Noire de…) was one of the first sub-Saharan films to make a major impact in Europe and North America. Sembène’s brilliant and stirring feature debut transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally—into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. A harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement.
Borom Sarret (1963, 19 mins) was Sembène’s very first film and among the earliest films produced in Africa by a black African. Sembène had to invent the filming techniques from scratch using a secondhand 16mm camera and film stock provided by friends from Europe. A poverty-stricken Senegalese cart driver tries to make a living as a taxi driver on the streets of just post-colonial Dakar. Many of his customers do not pay him and he is treated like dirt by his better off customers and officials alike. Welcome to the post-independence world.
“one of the most insightful, representations of the social life of a people lost in the space between traditional and postcolonial society” Bright Lights Film Journal
