Black Girl
CAST: Mbissine Therese Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Momar Nar Sene DIRECTOR: Ousmane Sembene SILVER SCREEN SOCIETY | MAR 24, 2023 | French with English Subtitles
Ousmane Sembene, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de . . .). Sembene, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot--about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison--into a complex, layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine Therese Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement--and one of the essential films of the 1960s.
"This elegantly stark dramatization of postcolonial pain was the first feature made in Africa by a sub-Saharan African to attract international notice... Sembene was congenitally incapable of making indifferent films, and everything that marked him out-- his fire, skill, compassion, and vision-- is fully present in his startling, unforgettable debut."Ashley Clark, Criterion.com
"Black Girl takes us into the heart of a world that may be strange and unfamiliar to those who watch it today. This is no Hollywood-produced, glamorized perspective of a Dakar from 50 years ago -- it-s a sincere, urgent look at issues that have since metastasized to create problems that plague contemporary Europe."James Berardinelli, ReelViews.net
