La Noire de...

An early success of Ousmane Sembene and scathing critique of colonialism. La noire, the black woman maid of a French family in Dakar and then France, is treated like a slave, a brutalized colonial subject, by her white mistress, and eventually rebels in most harrowing way. Diouana's shifting perspective in time seems to align well with the stages of negritude thought and nationalist identity favored by Sembene. I do have to agree with Roger Ebert's review that the film moves too slowly, but the final scene where the boy wearing his mask pursues Diouana's boss is quite powerful.