Black Girl

Black Girl follows Diouana, a young Senegalese woman who leaves Dakar for France to work for a bourgeois couple, caring for their children. What begins as an opportunity she welcomes turns into disappointment once the family returns to Antibes. There she is confined largely to domestic work, cut off from the society around her, and treated with condescension and contempt rather than the respect she expected. The gap between the life she imagined abroad and the servitude she finds is the film's central conflict.

The film was directed and written by Ousmane Sembène, and was released in 1966. It stands as the earliest entry in the body of work represented here, before Mandabi, Ceddo, Faat Kiné and Moolaadé. Mbissine Thérèse Diop plays Diouana, with Anne-Marie Jelinek and Robert Fontaine as the couple, and Nar Sene, Ibrahima Boy and Bernard Delbard in supporting roles. André Zwobada produced the film for Filmi Domirev and Les Actualités Françaises, and it runs sixty-five minutes.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.4 from around 7,100 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.3 from about 185 votes. The two audiences are closely aligned, and the far larger vote count on IMDb indicates a wider and more sustained viewership there. The ratings point to a film that has been consistently valued by viewers over the decades since its release.