Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer. The Los Angeles Times considered him one of the greatest authors of Africa and he has often been called the "father of African film". He was often credited for his work in the French style as Sembène Ousmane, which he seemed to favor as a way to underscore the "colonial imposition" of this naming ritual and subvert it. Descended from a Serer family through his mother from the line of Matar Sène, Ousmane Sembène was particularly drawn to Serer religious festivals. He especially was intrigued by the Tuur festival.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Read more Senses of CinemaTSPDTIMDb
Photo: Günter Prust, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Films
Critical context
Ousmane Sembène is primarily remembered for his milestone contribution to African film history. His early films represent a linguistic and cultural shift from telling the stories of Africans in colonial countries by colonial filmmakers or filmmakers who were descendants of colonials in their colonial languages to telling homegrown stories by Indigenous African filmmakers in Indigenous African languages. As the first to step behind the camera and achieve this shift in the history of African…