Film Forum

Senegal, 1988
Directed by Ousmane Sembène & Thierno Faty Sow
Screenplay by Ousmane Sembène & Thierno Faty Sow
Starring Ibrahima Sane, Sidiki Bakaba, Hamed Camara, Ismaël Lô, Jean-Daniel Simon
In French, English, and Wolof with English subtitles.
Approx. 154 mins. 4K DCP restoration.

WINNER Venice Film Festival – Grand Jury Prize, 1988

“A magisterial critique of the colonial mentality” – J. Hoberman. A searing war film based on a true, but little-reported incident, from African filmmaking pioneer Ousmane Sembène, alongside co-director and co-writer Thierno Faty Sow. In 1944, African infantrymen returning from WWII battles suffer unspeakable indignities in a makeshift transit camp at the hands of their French superiors in the lead-up to the infamous Thiaroye Massacre. The impassioned anti-imperialist epic — once banned for over a decade in France — returns to Film Forum thirty-five years to the day of its premiere on September 5, 1990, the opening day of our W. Houston Street home. 

Originally programmed by Karen Cooper for Film Forum

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with the Tunisian Ministry of Culture and the Senegalese Ministry of Culture and Historical Heritage. Special thanks to Mohammed Challouf. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO — in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna — to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.  

THE YFF ARCHIVE DIVE is a new screening series programmed specifically for YFF, curated from FF’s rich 55-year history of first-run premieres. The series introduces important, challenging works and underseen masterpieces to members in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s. Learn about YFF here. YFF-eligible members, please email jesse@filmforum.org for details on this and future YFF gatherings.

Reviews

“Sembène deeply personalizes it with heroic-flawed characters, lyrical frame-within-frame compositions and intimate-epic scope.”
– Scott Foundas, IndieWire

“Sembène and Sow have made what is not only a humane, passionate film, but an honest and vital memorial.”
– Tom Charity, Time Out

“An epic of David Lean dimensions.”
– Stuart Klawans, The New York Times

“Flecked with very dry humour...What distinguishes this film and gives it both significance and a singular dignity is the central performance by lbrahima Sane...and its profound sense of the look and feel of a corner of West Africa.”
– John Pym, Sight and Sound

“Powerful and moving... Sembène, in collaboration with Thierno Faty Sow, reclaims another of those fragments of history that have been concealed by colonialism.”
– John Leahy, BFI’s Monthly Film Bulletin

“In the oeuvre of Sembène, the largest figure in the relatively short history of African filmmaking, it is perhaps the work that modulates his passions most evenly: the angry humor of XALA married to the tragic howl of BLACK GIRL.”
– Bill Weber, Slant Magazine

On Ousmane Sembène:

“While he had a late start as a moviemaker, his films got better with age. They were the work of a pioneer; fierce, didactic, abundantly alive with pride, shame, fury, hope and realism… Art was his activism. His movies were dramas that made you laugh, comedies that shook your heart, tracts that boiled the blood.”
– Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

“For Sembène, cinema was night school for the masses and being an artist was a call to arms.”
– Yasmina Price, 4Columns

“Sembène's films unflinchingly — yet playfully — examine the reality of contemporary Africa.”
– Bérenice Reynaud, The New York Times

“Of all African film directors, Sembène is the first to confer value to images.”
– Med Hondo

“I’m not a militant of any party, I’m a militant through my art.”
– Ousmane Sembène