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Making Migration Visible / Screening of Black Girl
October 8, 2018, 6:00 PM
On October 8, the Maine Film Center and Railroad Square Cinema will take part in the statewide initiative Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks and Pathways. Events include companion exhibitions, lectures, films, performances, poetry readings, and community conversations.
At Railroad Square Cinema we will host Portland artist Titi de Baccarat's work for the month of October. On October 8 at 6:00 we will hold an opening for his show "With the heart and the reason."
At 7:15 we will screen the powerful 1966 film Black Girl. A community discussion hosted by Mouhamedoul Niang, Associate Professor of French at Colby College, will follow.
Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl ("La noire de..."). Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot — about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison — into a complex, layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world. Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement — and one of the essential films of the 1960s. (Unrated, 59 min.)