Black Girl + I Am Somebody

Black Girl
Directed by Ousmane Sembène (1966)
59min, DCP
With Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine, Nar Sene, Ibrahima Boy, Bernard Delbard, Nicole Donati, Raymond Lemeri, Suzanne Lemeri.

In French with English subtitles

Ousmane Sembène, the Pan-African Marxist and towering pioneer of African Cinema, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de…). The Senegalese Sembène, who was also a writer and former militant trade unionist, 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 ongoing racialized economic hierarchy and dynamics of the supposedly postcolonial world. Held together by a powerfully moving central performance by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing, intimate drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the most important films of the 60s.

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I Am Somebody
Directed by Madeline Anderson (1970)
28min, DCP

In 1969, Black women hospital workers in Charleston, SC, went on strike for union recognition and a wage increase, only to find themselves in a confrontation with the state government and the National Guard. Featuring Andrew Young, Charles Abernathy, and Coretta Scott King and produced by Local 1199, New York’s Drug and Hospital Union, I Am Somebody is a crucial document in the struggle for labor rights.