Black Girl

In Ousmane Sembène’s landmark debut feature, a young woman’s journey abroad becomes a quiet descent into isolation, as the promise of a new life slowly gives way to confinement and disillusionment.

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.

Preceded by Borom Sarret (1963, 20 min), Sembène’s groundbreaking first film, a stark portrait of labor and survival in postcolonial Dakar.

Part of Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair, a global series presented in partnership with the American Cinematheque.