BLACK GIRL AND BOROM SARRET

Mayworks Festival and Black Artists’ Network In Dialogue (BAND) are excited to present two films by visionary filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembène. We invite you to join us for an evening of classic labour films.

Black Girl (1966) tells the story of a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white family and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a prison, both figuratively and literally. The film is a layered critique of the lingering colonialist mind-set of a supposedly postcolonial world. It features a moving central performance by M’Bissine Thérèse Diop and has been described as “a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s”.

Boron Sarret (1963) is a short, stark masterpiece chronicling a day in the life of a Dakar cart-driver. The frustrating day of this “borom sarret” (a Wolof expression for cart-driver) leaves him cheated out of his wages and deprived of his cart. Sembène conveys the toll of natural loss, poverty, and the stain of European colonization on Africa. 

All Mayworks Festival events are free of charge. 

Ousmane Sembène (1923-2007) was born in southern Senegal. He chose not to follow the profession of his father, who was a fisherman and instead became a mechanic, then a mason, joined the French Army in 1942, and later became an active militant in the labor movement. In 1948, he left for France, where he worked as a longshoreman and helped to organize the African dock workers in Marseille. He published his first novel in 1956, Le Docker Noir, based on these experiences. Realizing that much of his target audience was illiterate, he decided to become a filmmaker and went to study in Moscow. Upon his return to Africa, Sembène began a long and illustrious career as a filmmaker. He is often regarded as the “Father of African Cinema,” a title befitting the first African to make a fiction film distributed outside Africa, Borom Sarret (1963). Sembène’s films have since inspired generations of African and diaspora filmmakers.  

Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue (BAND) is a gallery and community space dedicated to supporting, documenting and showcasing the artistic and cultural contributions of Black artists and cultural workers in Canada and internationally. BAND’s vision is to connect black culture to communities to inspire, enlighten and educate through the arts.