Black Girl, preceded by Borom Sarret

Presented by Centre Francophone Hamilton!

Black Girl (runtime: 65 min.)

60th Anniversary!

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.

Presented in French with English subtitles.

The presentation of Black Girl is preceded by the following short film:

Borom Sarret (runtime: 20 min.)

This groundbreaking short film, which won first prize at the 1963 Touris Film Festival in France, was the directorial debut of Ousmane Sembène. It is often cited as the first film (or first narrative film) made in Africa by an African, the first “professional” African film, and the first such film to be shown widely outside of Africa. Sembène’s Borom Sarret tells the story of a poor man trying to make a living as a cart driver in Dakar.

Presented in French with English subtitles.