"Actor: Robert Fontaine"

• Black Girl (1966) (Criterion Collection) UK Only - Original title: La noire de… | Blu Ray | (27/06/2022) from £21.39   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  OUSMANE SEMBÈNE (Xala, Faat Kiné) was one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived, as well as the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century but his name 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. Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plotabout 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 prison, both figuratively and literallyinto a complexly layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by M'BISSINE THÉRÈSE DIOP, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statementand one of the essential films of the 1960s. Special Features New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray 4K restoration of the short film Borom sarret, director Ousmane Sembène's acclaimed 1963 debut New interviews with scholars Manthia Diawara and Samba Gadjigo Excerpt from a 1966 broadcast of JT 20h, featuring Sembène accepting the Prix Jean Vigo for Black Girl New interview with actor M'Bissine Thérèse Diop Trailer New English subtitle translation PLUS: An essay by critic Ashley Clark More!

• Black Girl | DVD | (19/10/2015) from £17.39   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène was the first sub-Saharan African filmmaker to achieve international recognition and is widely regarded as 'the father of African cinema'. His first major work, Black Girl, is a sophisticated drama which won the 1966 Prix Jean Vigo, and which tells the story of Diouanne (Thérèse M'Bisine Diop), a young Senegalese woman eager to find a better life and who takes a job as a governess for a bourgeois French family. Mistreated by her employers, Diouanne's hopes turn to disillusionment and she descends into a state of isolation and despair. Sembène draws from the Nouvelle Vague, but the film's heart and soul is most definitely African. Sembène's directional debut, the short Borom Sarret, was the first ever indigenous black African film. An allegorical tale exploring poverty and inequality, it follows the difficult life of a hard-up cart driver in Dakar.