Black Girl (1966)

This film is funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Office of Arts & Culture.

Ousmane Sembène is one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived. The internationally renowned African director 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.