Country
France
Year
1966
Language
French spoken, English subtitles
Actors
Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine
Director
Ousmane Sembène
Duration
65 min
Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl stands as a landmark of African cinema, a film of piercing clarity that exposes the lingering architecture of colonial power.
Through the story of Diouana, a young Senegalese woman employed by a French couple, Sembène crafts a precise, devastating portrait of exploitation dressed up as benevolence. Its stark visual language and elliptical structure turn everyday gestures into indictments, revealing how identity can be stripped away in the most domestic of spaces. More than half a century later, the film’s moral force and formal rigor remain as urgent—and as unsettling—as ever.
“An astonishing movie—so ferocious, so haunting, and so unlike anything we’d ever seen”: this is how Martin Scorsese described Black Girl. Through assured framing, near‑geometric shot composition, and restrained black‑and‑white cinematography, Ousmane Sembène crafts an intimate study of colonialism’s enduring legacy. Each moment is marked by a quiet visual and spiritual intensity, articulating themes of resilience, resistance, and lived dignity.
8:00 PM - 9:26 PM
€ 13.00
Camera 2
During the Cinematic Beauty film programme, we take you on a journey through seven beautiful classics from around the world, each of which sheds a different light on beauty. What is the purpose of beauty in these films, and how does it contribute to what a film wants to tell us? In collaboration with a team of film scholars from the University of Groningen, Cinematic Beauty seeks answers to these questions.
