Join the Boston Sunday Night Film Club this Sunday, Aug 14th at 7pm for Black Girl at the Brattle Theatre. Look for Dan wearing a multicolored shirt in the theatre lobby about 15 minutes before the film. As always, after the film we will descend on a local establishment for dinner/drinks/discussion.
Ousmane Sembene, 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). Sembene, 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 Therese Diop, BLACK GIRL is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement and one of the essential films of the 1960s.