Black Girl

Originally intended to be feature length, Sembene's third film tells of the destruction of a young woman who leaves to work as a maid in Antibes. Sembene, who abandoned the novel for film, who trained in Moscow with Donskoi, and whose commitment to African cinema was in part provoked by the racism of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympiad, has here contrived a masterful if not entirely flawless rendering of the key themes in Francophone African cinema. It is an essential step in his project to 'totally Africanise the style and conception of my cinema'.