BLACK GIRL
SCREENING +
Discussion hosted by Asia Ahmed
& A LOOK INTO
BLACK GIRL (1966)
Ousmane Sembène was one of the most renowned African directors of the twentieth century. 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 family 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. Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement — and one of the essential films of the 1960s.