Black Girl

Starring the moving lead actress Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is both a harrowing human drama and a radical political statement - and one of the most important films of the 1960s.

Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally recognised African director of the 20th century, made his feature film debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de . . .). Sembène, who was also a celebrated 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 her small flat becomes a figurative and literal prison - into a complex, multi-layered critique of the persistence of a colonialist mentality in a supposedly post-colonial world.

French. Original version with English subtitles.