OUSMANE SEMBENE: IN THE FACE OF HISTORY at TIFF Bell Lightbox from Saturday (February 5) to February 13. 416-968-FILM. See Indie & Rep Film listings Rating: NNNN
This being black history month, it seems like a fine time for TIFF Cinematheque to honour late Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene with a retrospective titled In The Face Of History. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of him.
Sembene’s films rarely make it to Toronto’s repertory screens, and to the best of my knowledge only one of them – his final film, Moolaade – was ever released on DVD in Canada. (The distributor lost the rights almost immediately, but it’s since shown up on Netflix.)
I can see why distributors consider Sembene’s films a low priority. The director, who died in 2007 at age 84, wasn’t exactly a popular favourite in the West. He was known – if he was known at all – as a thoughtful filmmaker who took polarizing social and political subjects and turned them into compelling human stories.
Sembene used the screen as a window into African culture. Colonialism was a recurring theme, and 2004’s Moolaade tackled the topic of ritual female circumcision, but he wasn’t a sensationalist. Rather than use the film as a moralizing screed, Sembene turned it into an examination of the ways in which people struggle to reconcile the opposing cultural forces of tradition and progress.
The director grew up in Senegal, moved to France in the late 1940s and slowly established himself as a writer. His first feature, 1966’s La Noire De…, explored the disillusionment of a young Senegalese woman (Mbissine Therese Diop) who moves to France to be a nanny and finds herself regarded as little more than an exotic servant.
The same theme of Africans caught between their own aspirations and the figurative shackles of European culture can be found in 1974’s Xala, adapted from his own novel, in which a businessman’s attempts to free himself from a curse of impotence are paralleled by his nation’s desire to shake off colonial rule.
The white man’s culture is largely absent from Moolaade, Sembene’s final feature. Set in a tiny village in Burkina Faso, the film explores the collision of beliefs that ensues when four young girls seek sanctuary from ritual mutilation in the home of a sympathetic woman (Fatoumata Coulibaly) who protects them by placing a curse on her door that will ruin anyone who dares to cross it.
The irony of using one superstition to defeat another isn’t lost on Sembene, who clearly understands the value of tradition to people who’ve been dragged by progress into the 21st century without really having time to develop contemporary mores. (The movie in no way condones genital mutilation, of course.)
Saturday evening’s screening of La Noire De… will be preceded by a 5 pm lecture by Carleton film professor Aboubakar Sanogoa on Sembene’s work and influence. It’s free with the purchase of a ticket to any of TIFF Cinematheque’s Sembene presentations.
normw@nowtoronto.com