Feature film
Black Girl
La Noire de…
Ousmane Sembène · 1966
Synopsis
Diouana, a young woman from a poor village near Dakar, looks for work in the wake of independence. A French couple hire her to look after their children, then take her to Antibes, where she hopes for a new life. There she finds only an apartment she hardly ever leaves: she is expected to cook and clean, the guests look at her as an exotic curiosity, and her sadness is taken for laziness. On the white wall of the living room hangs, alone, the mask she had given her employers.
Context
The film is taken from a short story that the author had published in 1962 in a collection, and was shot for the most part in Senegal. Mbissine Thérèse Diop plays Diouana, but the voice we hear is that of the Haitian singer and actress Toto Bissainthe. The photography is by Christian Lacoste. The mask returns from one end of the story to the other, surrounded by African objects in Dakar, isolated in France, and critics read in it the very figure of the heroine. In 2015, the Film Foundation's World Cinema Project restored it with the Institut national de l'audiovisuel, at the laboratory of the Cinémathèque de Bologna; the print was shown at Cannes the same year.
Who it is for
About an hour, in French and in black and white, with a linear story interspersed with flashbacks to Senegal. It can be watched without prior knowledge.
Prizes and reception
Prix Jean Vigo in 1966 and Tanit d'or at the Carthage festival the same year. Often regarded as the first fiction feature film by a filmmaker from sub-Saharan Africa.
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