Hello, my name is Justin the Clute. I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club. And today we're doing an episode on Usman Semben.

Yeah, that's right. We're talking about the man who is still probably the best-known African oture, and a man commonly

regarded as the father of African cinema. Even though that he always tries to throw that label

away and say, no, I'm just trying to make movies that will speak to an African audience. I don't want

to be just like the international African director. I want to be a movie making films for an

African audience. Nevertheless, he's from Senegal, which shortly after its decolonization,

shortly after France left in 1960, he was the first filmmaker there to make a feature-length

film. And he made it out of stray, like, 35-millimeter film that he was

given by friends in Europe. Had you had any experience with Usman-Semban before this?

None. Absolutely none. Have you had much experience with African cinema before this?

I've tried. It's one of the world cinemas that is very, that it's easy to bounce off of.

Like, there's no, like,

canon in the way that you go to Hong Kong cinema and it has this like big fans. And there's a

whole list of movies that people will tell you to check out first. Yeah, it's hard to know where to

go. I had seen some Semben because when I was in undergrad, I took a cinema and authorship

class. And one of the several

tours that was taught in that class was Semben, so I'd seen Black Girl and Chado and Hala,

like 12 or 13 years ago, and I didn't remember them very well at all, and I was very young

and didn't understand the context for the films.

This is not like Scorsese. Where are the

crazy camera moves? How can this be an otter? Exactly. Well, I mean, I recognized that he was an

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