Downtown Springfield Association
Essential Arthouse: Black Girl (1996)

Essential Arthouse: Black Girl (1996)

February, 15 2023 | 7:00 pm

305 South Campbell Avenue #101 Springfield, Missouri 65806
https://www.moxiecinema.com/films/black-girl-1966


All Essential Arthouse films are Free for Members.

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. [Janus]

Starring: Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Language: French
Genre: Drama