Black Girl

Senegal/1966—directed by Ousmane Sembène | 59 minutes

Ousmane Sembène, 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 . . .). Sembène, 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 Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s. Winner, 1966 Prix Jean Vigo. In French with English subtitles.

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors, working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London.