The debut feature of Ousmane Sembne, the father of African cinemaa scathing critique of colonialism set in 1960s France Ousmane Sembne was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth centuryand yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembne, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plotabout 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, both figuratively and literallyinto a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by MBissine Thrse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statementand one of the essential films of the 1960s.