The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène is often celebrated, rightly, as the Father of African Cinema. In his remarkably prolific decades during and after Africa’s liberation period, his complexly humanistic films, popping with compassion and humor, richly depicted post-colonial West African life and its many paradoxes. Sembène proved that cinema, once a vicious colonizer’s tool, would be a magnificent medium for African storytelling methods and Afro-centric stories. These 4K restorations of Sembène’s films have been prepared in honor of the centennial of the filmmaker’s birth.
