Ousmane Sembรจne was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most renowned African director of the twentieth centuryโand yet his name still deserves to be better known in the rest of the world. He made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl. Sembรจne, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plotโabout a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literallyโinto a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by MBissine Thรฉrรจse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statementโand one of the essential films of the 1960s.