Our Memory followed by Black Girl

Director: Ousmane Sembène, Johanna Makabi

1966 / 77min / DCP

Sembène adapted one of his own short stories for his directorial debut, the winner of the Prix Jean Vigo and by many reckonings the film that announced sub-Saharan African cinema to the wider world. Dreaming of a new life in France, Senegalese housemaid Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) follows her employers from Dakar to their home in the Antibes, where she finds herself treated with a new tone of high-handed authority, and slowly, silently—save for what we hear of her inner life via French-language voiceover—succumbs to the stultifying effects of deepening depression. Screening with Our Memory, in which Diop looks back over her life as an actress almost 60 years after appearing in Sembène’s haunting portrait of colonialism, in a film by Villa Albertine resident Joanna Makabi, who will appear in person.

Q&A with Johanna Makabi, director of Our Memory, moderated by Yassine Ait Ali, PhD Candidate in French & Comparative Literature at Princeton University