Country:Senegal

Director:Ousmane Sembene

Summary:

Moolaadé is a rousing Brechtian spectacle that feels like an oral history of a distinctly unpleasant topic: the all-too-common practice of female genital mutilation, still held by many in 39 African countries, under the auspices of Islamic tradition. Set in a colorful Burkina Faso village dotted with immense, man-tall anthills, four small girls resist “purification,” or going under the knife. A powerful woman takes the girls into her home, stringing a rope across her doorway that symbolizes the “moolaadé,” or traditional protection, against the patriarchs.

Country:Senegal

Director:Ousmane Sembene

Summary:

With Faat Kiné (2000) Sembene has for the first time since Black Girl a woman as his main character. Here he deals directly with the intersection of gender politics and neo-colonial politics: Faat Kiné's treatment by men who only want to take advantage of her becomes a mirror for the inadequacies of the patriarchal society. Faat Kine's steadfastness and ultimate triumph reflect Sembène's enduring optimism and his belief that Africans must become both self-sufficient and socially responsible. Sembene has said: "Africa's society and economy are held together today by women.

Country:Senegal

Director:Ousmane Sembene

Summary:

For Xala, Sembene adapted his own novel. It is the dawn of Senegal's independence from France, but as the citizens celebrate in the streets we soon become aware that only the faces have changed. White money still controls the government. One official, Aboucader Beye, known by the title ‘El Hadji’, takes advantage of some of that money to marry his third wife, to the sorrow and chagrin of his first two wives and the resentment of his nationalist daughter. But he discovers on his wedding night that he has been struck with a ‘xala’, a curse of impotence.

Country:Senegal

Director:Ousmane Sembene

Summary:

Sembene traces the descent of a poor Senegalese Muslim who, upon trying to cash a money-order at his village post office, somehow finds himself pitted against bureaucratic and societal forces. The protagonist, Ibrahim, is a lazy and vain but fundamentally decent man, whose unexpected windfall becomes the catalyst of his downfall - the means by which this simple, more-or-less honest, individual comes face-to-face with the indifference, the corruption of the modern world.

Country:Senegal

Director:Ousmane Sembene

Summary:

A Senegalese woman is eager to find a better life abroad. She takes a job as a governess for a French family, but finds her duties reduced to those of a maid after the family moves from Dakar to the south of France. In her new country, the woman is constantly made aware of her race and mistreated by her employers. Her hope for better times turns to disillusionment and she falls into isolation and despair.

Country:Senegal

Director:Ousmane Sembene

Summary:

With this first short film, Sembene appeared to be the first African to join the ranks of the Third Cinema appearing in South-America in the sixties which frequently portrayed the long suffering day to day existence of the abject and apparently downtrodden. Yet Sembene focuses on the dignity of the oppressed who, despite their poverty and hardship, refuse to compromise their ideals and pride. The film follows a cart driver through Dakar as he scrapes together a living.