Short film
Borom Sarret
Ousmane Sembène · 1963
Synopsis
Dakar, in 1962. A poor cart driver leaves his wife in the morning and goes off to wait for customers near the Sandaga market. The day is spent driving through the working-class neighbourhoods those who can hardly pay: a woman about to give birth, a father carrying his dead son to the cemetery who is turned away for lack of papers. Then a well-dressed customer asks him to go up to the Plateau, the administrative district where carts are not allowed to enter. He hesitates, and goes there anyway.
Context
The film runs about twenty minutes, from eighteen to twenty-two depending on the copies, in black and white; the cinematography is by Christian Lacoste and the cart driver is played by Abdoulaye Ly. Its maker regarded it as his first real short film, and it received the first-work prize at the Tours festival in 1963. It has often been called the first fiction film shot in sub-Saharan Africa by an African, which some historians dispute. The World Cinema Foundation and the INA restored it in 2013 from the original negatives, and Cannes showed it the same year.
Who it is for
A short, subtitled film that can be watched without knowing anything about Senegal. One day, with no plot in the strict sense.
Prizes and reception
It won a prize at Tours on its release; restored in 2013, it was shown the same year at the Cannes Film Festival.
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