La noire de..11/20/2022 He draws visually from the French Nouvelle Vague (in a film about racial and class divides, the black-and-white photography carries new power) and spiritually from the Italian neorealists, but the film’s heart and soul is African. Sembène highlights her silence, familiar to the voiceless across the globe, yet reveals Diouana’s immense dignity and, by the end, agency. As the daily and unrelenting indignities unfold, Diouana, the title character, literally loses her voice. La Noire de… follows a young girl lured to France by a white bourgeoisie couple, who keep her locked in their flat as a housekeeper. His explosive debut – a film described as the first African feature (true in spirit, if not in fact) – inspired a form of fearless, socially engaged, and uncompromising cinema across the globe. In 1961, shortly after Senegal declared its independence from France, Ousmane Sembène, a self-educated dockworker, assigned himself an impossible task: to create a true African cinema as a ‘night school’ for his people. I’m extremely proud to be presenting our second restoration of a Sembène film. An astonishing movie – so ferocious, so haunting, and so unlike anything we’d ever seen. Black Girl, or La Noire de…, was the first of Ousmane Sembène’s pictures to make a real impact in the west, and I can clearly remember the effect it had when it opened in New York in 1969, three years after it came out in Senegal.
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