Black Girl (La noire de...)

Ousmane Sembe?ne, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived as well as the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring BlackGirl (La noire de . . .). Sembe?ne, 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 prison, both figuratively and literally-into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine The?re?se Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement-and one of the essential films of the 1960s.