black girl (ousmane sembène, 1966)

This is the twenty-eighth film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2023-24", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 9th annual challenge, and my fifth time participating (previous years can be found at "2019-20", "2020-21", "2021-22", and "2022-23"). Week 28 is called "World Cinema Project Week":

Martin Scorsese founded the World Cinema project in 2007 with the goal of preserving and restoring films from around the globe that otherwise would become neglected. They focus on films that do not get a lot of exposure in the West and that are at risk of becoming lost because of the lack of resources some countries have to preserve their own films. They continue to work on this endeavor to this day, so far ensuring that 54 films from 30 different countries have been preserved and accessible to a global audience through screenings, Criterion boxsets with 24 of the films on DVD and Blu-ray, and through streaming on the Criterion Channel.

Whether you’re Marching Around the World this month or not, let’s all enjoy one of the films preserved by the World Cinema Project and remember how inaccessible the voices and perspective of people around the world can be for even the most avid moviegoer. Michael Hutchins maintains an up-to-date list here.

Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project is one of the great gifts the celebrated director has given the film world. I've seen a handful of the films on the above list and most of them have been very good, with one classic-to-me, Buñuel's Los Olvidados. Black Girl is a perfect example of the treasures to be uncovered in the project. Ousmane Sembène was an esteemed writer from Senegal who wanted to expand his audience by making films. After two shorts, he wrote and directed Black Girl, which became known as the first Sub-Saharan African film to get attention worldwide. It tells the story of a Senegalese woman, Diouana, who gets a job with a white French couple, who later take her with them to France. Sembène uses a complex narrative structure that bounces between the present and Diouana's past life back in Senegal.

The essential examination in Black Girl is of colonialism and race, but Sembène draws a sensitive performance from first-time actor Mbissine Thérèse Diop as Diouana that personalizes the story even as it points to how colonialism affects its victims. The film is short, but the story of Diouana feels extensive, and ultimately heartbreaking. Sembène pulls no punches. #272 on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They list of the top 1000 films of all time.