Overview
Black Girl (La noire de ... ) (1966)/Borom Sarret (1963)Classics at the Browning
Ousmane Sembène, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de ... ). 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 her life 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 '60s. Black Girl will be preceded by Sembène’s first film, Borom Sarret, a short piece focusing on the life of a cart driver in Dakar.
Free for Notre Dame students.Sponsored by the Meg and John P. Brogan Endowment for Classic Cinema.
