With the brilliant BLACK GIRL, Sembène transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison—into a layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world. BLACK GIRL, one of the essential films of the 1960s, is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement. Preceded by BOROM SARRET (1963, 20 min.) and NIAYE (1964, 35 min.)