Ousmane Sembène died in 2007 at the age of 84. In February, New Yorker released his final
film, Moolade, on a two-disc edition, filled with featurettes on Sembene and his work and a 25-minute video interview conducted with the director as Moolade was being released. My review will run in my Tuesday DVD column.

In the meantime, here is an introductory essay I wrote about Ousmane Sembène for a Seattle retrospective sponsored by Northwest Film Forum in 2001, expanded with excerpts from my coverage in the Seattle P-I and updated to include Moolaade.

Ousmane Sembène: Godfather of Black African Cinema

“In response to a student’s question about his background, Ousmane Sembène recalled that he had been expelled from primary school in Senegal for striking back at his French teacher who had slapped him. His fisherman father was not particularly perturbed by this cataclysmic event – cataclysmic because it closed the school door permanently for Sembène. In fact, he was pleased with his son’s strident defense of his invaded personhood.” – from Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics and Writers

Senegalese born Ousmane Sembène remains the elder statesman of black African cinema and one of Africa’s most important novelists. Practically self educated, Sembene took a succession of jobs, notably soldier and dock worker (where he became active in the unions and became a delegate) before he turned to writing while in his late 30s. He slipped himself into France after WWII to master the language and wrote his poems and first novels in French, spending over a decade in Europe before returning home to Senegal in 1960. Already recognized as one of the leading African novelists, he worked and lived in France, wrote in French, and was published and read primarily in Europe. The contradictions bothered him: even if he chose to write in his native Wolof he wouldn’t be read outside the universities or intellectual circles. To reach a wider audience – and, even more importantly, an African audience – he turned to filmmaking.

He trained for 2 years in a Soviet Union film school before returning again to Africa and after an unreleased documentary commissioned by the Mali government he made his first acclaimed film at the age of 40, Borom Sarret (1966), a devastating look at the poverty of Senegal’s urban slums through a day in the life of a poor cart driver in Dakar. Writing the script after spending a month learning the lives of cart drivers in Dakar, Sembène condensed an entire day’s worth of experiences into 20 minutes of deceptively simple drama, a neo-realist approach transplanted to the devastating poverty of Senegal’s urban slums. Shot on the most meager of budgets and performed by an almost completely non-professional cast, Sembène turns his technical limitations into a powerfully direct and rich style, capturing not simply the life of one man but the social culture of the newly independent Senegal and the problems still to overcome.

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