Black Girl

Black Girl
Directed by Ousmane Sembène
(Senegal, France, 1966, 59 minutes)

Opening Reception: 6-7pm
Film Screening: 7pm

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.

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Architecture Center Houston is proud to present Revolutionary Architecture. A film festival that focuses on architecture, city, and space to spark a political discourse or change the development of the film’s political narrative. Buildings and space are inherently political, built by capitalism yet considered a universal right by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as adopted by the United Nations. Consistently, the largest issues of our time are shaped by the spaces we inhabit, whether by the space’s value as a social space or by its geographic significance, or by other political means. Just as revolution has opposing sides, design and space can be narrated from opposing views. This film program explores the paradigms of revolutionary space and architecture through a multitude of perspectives, with the hope to cultivate discussions of voice, authority, and subjectivity of revolution and change. The film festival runs from Thursday, September 1 through Sunday, September 4, with a opening reception on Thursday.