I’ve crossed over into total film dweeb status. Not a film geek, mind you; I haven’t paid close attention to what’s new and noteworthy since I left the video store, and even less since I left TLA altogether [it’s been almost a year already: wow] so when I read Ousmane Sembene’s obituary a week and a half ago, I couldn’t believe I’d never seen anything by him, having hunted and pecked at films and filmmakers occupying more or less the same political and aesthetic orbit he did. Pontecorvo and Costa-Gavras, but not Sembene? Now it seems absurd.
So what did I do? Like any obituary vulture, I swooped into my Netflix queue and jumped his landmark film Black Girl to the top. Sembene tells the story of a Senegalese girl turned au pair who travels with her employers back to France to care for the children. Sembene uses neorealist and New Wave techniques to illustrate the divide between the newly independent Senegalese and expatriate French who lived and worked there. Diounna’s journey “back” to her inherited Fatherland comes at the price of her identity and her dignity, neither of which she can live without. It’s a crushing indictment of what is owed by international powers to the countries they exploit once they’ve “granted” independence.