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1966, Africans in French colonies had only recently been permitted to make their own films.
Senegalese writer Ousmane Sembène used that freedom to make Black Girl (La noire de...), often considered the first sub-Saharan African film to receive international recognition
- and the first to win the Prix Jean Vigo.
A young Senegalese woman Diouana leaves Dakar for the south of France, lured by the promise of a better life working for a French couple.
This was Sembene's feature debut, after two shorts - Borom Sarret (1963), Niaye (1964). He turned to filmmaking at around 40, convinced that cinema could reach the African masses in ways literature never could, given widespread illiteracy. He was prepared, in his words, to "sleep with the devil or she-devil to make my films." He came of age watching films in Senegal's segregated cinemas. He worked on the docks of Marseilles, joined the French Communist Party, broke his backbone unloading a ship, and spent his recovery educating himself. At 14, he was expelled from school for striking back at a racist, violent French teacher.
Sembène studied filmmaking in Moscow for a year before returning to Senegal.
The screenplay for Black Girl was rejected by the head of the Ministry of Cooperation's Cinema Bureau- the body that funded French-speaking African films, for its subject matter.
Sembène cut the film's length to comply with the Centre national du cinéma. He coined the term mégotage, a sardonic riff on Eisenstein's montage theory, translating as
"cigarette-butt cinema" - to describe the desperate resourcefulness African filmmakers had to employ just to get a film made.
The African mask Diouana gives her employers is one of cinema's most precise visual metaphors for what colonialism does to a culture: strips it of dignity and puts it on display.