In Movies as Politics, Jonathan Rosenbaum makes a case for Senegal writer-director Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl as the symbolic genesis of sub-Saharan African filmmaking, at least to the extent that the authorship belonged to a born and bred African and not a well-meaning European ethnographer like, for instance, the extraordinary Moi, un noir's Jean Rouch. Based on one of his own anti-colonialist stories, Sembene's film begins with the arrival of Diouana, a stylish young black woman, to the French Riviera. Giddy on dreams of attaining true cosmopolitanism, Diouana has accepted a job as a domestic to a diffident married couple. In Senegal, she was a nanny to their children. But once she arrives in France and gets set to sweep floors, scrub bathtubs, and prepare spice-free versions of her homeland cuisine for houseguests (the couple's kids apparently study abroad), she comes to the slow realization that her employees are more like masters and her domestic position is really just paid slavery.
