Ousmane Sembène, often called “the father of African film,” was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth century—and yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world.
Black Girl, Sembène’s debut and one of several masterpieces to his name, and his best known film, was the highest finishing African film in Sight and Sound‘s most recent poll of the greatest films of all time. This beautiful and stirring film transforms a deceptively simple plot into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. A young Senegalese woman moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both physically and psychologically.
Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine 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.