SAT SEP 23, 2023 1:00 PM “Niyae” / BLACK GIRL $8.00 (member) ; $13.00 (general admission) Los Feliz 3 | ‘Ousmane Sembène Centennial: An American Cinematheque Retrospective’ Tickets are no longer on sale for this event.
ABOUT THE FILMS: “Niyae”, 1964, Dir: Ousmane Sembène, 35 MINUTES, Janus Films, Senegal. In French with English subtitles. Fathered by the village chief, a 13-year-old girl’s pregnancy scandalizes her community and unravels her family. FORMAT: DCP BLACK GIRL, 1966, Dir: Ousmane Sembène, 59 Minutes, Janus Films, Senegal. In French with English subtitles. Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring BLACK GIRL (La noire de . . .). Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison—into a complex, layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, BLACK GIRL is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s. FORMAT: DCP