Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the 20th century. Black Girl is his feature debut. 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 family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison – into a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M’Bissine 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.
Restored in 2015 by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Sembène Estate, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, INA, Eclair laboratories and Centre National de Cinématographie. Restoration carried out at Cineteca di Bologna/ L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory.

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