Black Girl with Borom Sarret

Sembène 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.

Black Girl screens with Borom Sarret, a powerful indictment of neocolonialism which follows a day in the life of a poor horse-cart driver, as we see him being manipulated and swindled by a series of customers.

“Black Girl was the first feature made in Senegal, and the first feature about black Africans to have been written and directed by a black African. No other national or cultural cinema started as confidently… The result is a film that’s blatantly political, but never grandstanding, and significantly better at demonstrating the link between social forces and the emotions of everyday life than most of its high-minded European contemporaries.” —Ignatiy Vishnevesky, The A.V. Club

Film Details

Black Girl

Language: French, English subtitles

Year: 1966

Running time: 85 min

Director: Ousmane Sembène

Borom Sarret
Language: French, English subtitles
Year: 1963
Running time: 20 min
Director: Ousmane Sembène

Films and schedules may be subject to change.