Jan 30, 2017 — It wasn’t until the second half of his life that Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène dedicated himself to cinema, with his debut feature, Black Girl, premiering in 1966 when he was forty-three. Already an acclaimed novelist, Sembène had lived in France...

Jan 23, 2017 — In his radical debut feature, Ousmane Sembène reveals the agony of the postcolonial experience through the story of a Senegalese migrant abused by her French employers.

The writer and director reminisces about seeing Black Girl in the cinema with his mom as a child, shares how True Stories and Election influenced his approach to filmmaking, and talks about the emotional truth behind the visual artifice of...

The writer and director pays tribute to the late Béla Tarr, shares his love for the way Andrei Tarkovsky merged poetry and cinema, and suggests watching a double bill of Black Girl and I Knew Her Well.

The musician and actor talks about what makes Stan Brakhage’s films “very punk rock,” reflects on working with Jonathan Demme, and selects favorite films such as Black Girl and True Stories.

May 1, 2024 — Films by Horace Ové, Menelik Shabazz, John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien, and more depict Black lives in a tumultuous era.

Dec 13, 2022 — A departure from the tales of sex and violence that defined Black cinema in the early 1970s, Michael Schultz’s beloved coming-of-age film celebrates the emotional bonds among a group of young Black men.

Oct 15, 2021 — There is a gloriously unaffected vibe about Gina Prince-Bythewood. Cerebral and sublime, casually beautiful and laser-focused, she has written and directed impressive television and film for the past twenty-plus years with equal parts rigor and joy. And she has achieved...

Oct 25, 2022 — One of the few American films of its era directed by a Black woman, Kasi Lemmons’s feature debut advances a critique of patriarchy and asks questions about gender and sexuality that still resonate today.

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...