Sembene!
Director: Jason Silverman
Logline: This innovative documentary combines original and archival footage with animation to tell the story of the great Senegalese filmmaker/novelist Ousmane Sembene, who used storytelling as a means of political resistance and cultural renaissance. By dedicating his life to creating meaningful, fully African works, Sembene created a potent counter-narrative to the alienating stories presented by outsiders from Europe and the U.S.
Synopsis: When Ousmane Sembéne first picked up a movie camera in the early 1960s, Africa’s film-going diet consisted entirely of American and European movies, all of which served as containers for Western ideologies. There were no cameras, no labs, no crew, no trained actors. No sub-Saharan African had ever made a movie in Africa before. But by the time of his death in 2007, Sembéne had, against incredibly long odds, created nine provocative, innovative and moving African feature films, in African languages, using African actors and telling African stories. These films, along with his nine novels, situate Sembene as perhaps the most important African cultural figure of the past 50 years, and one of history’s greatest revolutionary storytellers.
The feature documentary SEMBENE! reveals the mechanics of the modern, corporate- or government-controlled media, the radical possibilities of storytelling. Most of all, SEMBENE! celebrates an artist who, better than any, embodies the need to reclaim our stories from outsiders. Through Sembene’s life and work, the film will explore the global political-social forces that have shaped the past century, using an innovative blend of animation, original footage, scenes from his films and never-before-seen archival photographs and film in a way that will inspire young African, African-American and African-European youth who still absorb stories from a media system that doesn’t represent them.