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THREE REVOLUTIONARY FILMS BY OUSMANE SEMBÈNE
 Having blazed a trail for African filmmakers to tell their own stories on-screen, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène took his career-long project—to unlock cinema’s potential as a vehicle for social change—in increasingly urgent and provocative directions in the 1970s. Searing critiques of colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination, his three features from this decade—the radical call to resistance Emitaï, the wickedly subversive satire Xala, and the controversial historical epic Ceddo—confirmed his standing as a fearless truth-teller for whom the camera was the ultimate weapon in the fight against oppression in all its forms.
THREE-DISC SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
• New 4K digital restorations of all three films, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks
• New conversation between Mahen Bonetti, founder and executive director of the African Film Festival, and film writer Amy Sall
• The Making of “Ceddo,” a 1981 documentary by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra
• New English subtitle translations
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar Yasmina Price
BLU-RAY EDITION
SRP: $99.95
PREBOOK: 4/16/24
STREET: 5/21/24
CAT. NO.: CC3552BD
ISBN: 979-8-88607-137-5
UPC: 7-15515-29591-8
DVD EDITION
SRP: $79.95
PREBOOK: 4/16/24
STREET: 5/21/24
CAT. NO.: CC3553DDVD
ISBN: 979-8-88607-138-2
UPC: 7-15515-29601-4
EMITAÏ
1971 • 101 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Diola and French with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
With revolutionary outrage, Ousmane Sembène chronicles a period during World War II when French colonial forces in Senegal conscripted young men of the Diola people and attempted to seize rice stores for soldiers back in Europe. As the tribe’s patriarchal leaders pray and make sacrifices to their gods, the women in the community refuse to yield their harvests, incurring the French army’s wrath. With a deep understanding of the oppressive forces that have shaped Senegalese history, Emitaï explores the strains that colonialism places upon cultural traditions and, in the process, discovers a people’s hidden reserves of rebellion and dignity.
XALA
1975 • 123 minutes • Color • Monaural • In French and Wolof with English subtitles • 1.66:1 aspect ratio
An adaptation of Ousmane Sembène’s own 1973 novel, Xala is a hilarious, caustic satire of political corruption under an inept patriarchy. On the night of his wedding to his third bride, government official El Hadji (Thierno Leye) is rendered impotent and begins to suspect that one of his other wives has placed a curse on him. After seeking a cure from a local marabout, El Hadji must face the possibility that he deserves the infliction for his part in embezzling public funds and for helping to keep Senegal under French control. Adeptly combining elements of African folklore and popular cinema, Sembène indicts the hubris, entitlement, and opportunism of male authority figures.
CEDDO
1977 • 116 minutes • Color • Monaural • In Wolof with English subtitles • 1.85:1 aspect ratio
In precolonial Senegal, members of the Ceddo (or “outsiders”) kidnap Princess Dior Yacine (Tabata Ndiaye) after her father, the king, pledges loyalty to an ascendant Islamic faction that plans to convert the entire clan to its faith. Attempts to recapture her fail, provoking further division and eventual war between the animistic Ceddo and the fundamentalist Muslims, with Christian missionaries and slave traders from Europe also playing a role in the conflict. Banned in Senegal upon its release, Ceddo is an ambitious, multilayered epic that explores the combustible tensions among ancient tradition, religious colonization, political expediency, and individual freedom.
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In 1959, Yasujiro Ozu remade his 1934 silent classic A Story of Floating Weeds in color with celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. Setting his later version in a seaside location, Ozu otherwise preserves the details of his elegantly simple plot wherein an aging actor returns to a small town with his troupe and reunites with his former lover and their son, a scenario that enrages his current mistress and results in heartbreak for all. Together, the films offer a unique glimpse into the evolution of one of cinema’s greatest directors. A Story of Floating Weeds finds Ozu in the midst of developing his mode of expression; Floating Weeds reveals his distinct style at its pinnacle. In each, the director captures the joy and sadness of everyday life.
Having brought British cinema into exalted realms of fantasy and imagination, Michael Powell took a dark detour into obsession, voyeurism, and violence with this groundbreaking metacinematic investigation into the mechanics of fear. Armed with his killer camera, photographer and filmmaker Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) unleashes the traumas of his childhood by murdering women and recording their deaths—until he falls for his downstairs neighbor, and finds himself struggling against his dark compulsions. Received with revulsion upon its release only to be reclaimed as a masterpiece, the endlessly analyzed, still-shocking Peeping Tom dares viewers to confront their own relationship to the violence on-screen.
The closer we look, the less we know in Justine Triet’s masterful Palme d’Or–winning Anatomy of a Fall, an eerily riveting courtroom thriller that examines the line where truth becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. When Sandra Voyter (a transfixing Sandra Hüller), a writer who turns the material of her life into autofiction, is put on trial for the suspicious death by defenestration—or was it suicide?—of her husband, it opens up an inquiry that will turn a troubled home inside out. Tapping into the minimalist intensity of a chamber drama—and using intricate, elliptical editing—Triet constructs a mystery that is ultimately less about a death than about the hidden lives we lead.
Bullied by her father at home and feeling adrift at school, Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) finds refuge in an unexpected pocket of her native Brooklyn—a timeworn boxing gym, where she learns to channel her strength, discovers a sense of community, and falls for a rival fighter. In Karyn Kusama’s raw, understated feature debut, Rodriguez commands the screen with both tightly coiled intensity and deep wells of vulnerability as a young woman hitting back at society’s expectations and her own personal demons. Capturing the full emotional weight of Diana’s journey and the kinetic thrill of bodies in motion, Kusama crafts a singularly uncompromising story of self-realization.
