Sembene’s first film (aside from an unreleased documentary on the Songhay Empire, made for the government of Mali), Borom Sarret (“cart owner”) chronicles a day in the life of a beleaguered horse-cart driver in Dakar. In spite of the material limitations of the production—if not because of the challenges they posed—Borom Sarret manages to create a powerful social statement as it combines simple means with complex observations on bureaucracy, religion, and the anonymity of the modern city. Compressing his narrative into a mere nineteen minutes, Sembene conveys the condition of Senegal’s urban poor as he situates their experience in the larger social panorama of post-independence Africa.

Regarded as the first major film in the evolution of African cinema, Black Girl chronicles the bitter and unambiguous story of a young Senegalese woman who is hired on the “maid market” in Dakar and taken to the Riviera by her white French employers. Under conditions that Sembene saw as a new form of slavery, she falls into the ultimate despair of isolation and invisibility. Inspired by a news story, the film made a profound impression at international film festivals in 1966. The first work by a sub–Saharan black director to have been seen outside the continent, Black Girl represents the essential first step in Sembene’s self-described project to counter the “neocolonialism [that] is passed on culturally through the cinema.