Inhalte(1)
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. (Criterion)
(mehr)Kritiken (1)
An awakening and self-critical sobriety-generating film for a European viewer. It's not just about the content being self-reflective and clearly unfavorable for a European who daily walks around public buildings and bourgeois palaces from the turn of the century built on the bones of Africans and the severed hands of their children in the capitals of our cities. This could (and sometimes they truly do) also be proven by a white filmmaker. It is about the complete absence of any attempt at exculpation of white characters, about cowardly psychologization and individualization, through which European artists escape painful self-reflection simply by showing... how morally difficult it actually was for white people to kill or rob black people, that someone among the colonizers always tried to help them too (and let's not forget who built those railways!), that massacres (Amritsar, Sétif, Guelma et Kherrata, etc.) were a matter of unsystematic excess on the part of certain officials, and so on and so forth. No, from the perspective of an African filmmaker, we will not see any of this, completely legitimately and understandably - on the screen, we will only see what those white bastards, carrying the burden of civilization to Africa, actually did. That image is indeed "flat," but is accurate precisely because of it - the factuality of their actions cannot be concealed from the eyes of an African by anything that exceeds their actual external behavior.
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