Watch Anytime • Virtual Screening Room: BLACK GIRL

SPECIAL SCREENING SERIES: BLACK GIRL
Available to your home theater through the Olympia Film Society
Streaming tickets now available!
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.
Dir: Ousmane Sembène / 1966 / Senegal / 59 min

“Sembene’s debut feels as timely today as it did half a century ago.” — John Powers, NPR’s Fresh Air

“A remarkable personal-is-political drama.” — Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times

“With Black Girl, Ousmane Sembene crafts one of cinema’s finest portraits of African neocolonialism.” — Maria Garcia, Film Journal International