A man of, and inspired by, Africa

He receives visitors under an umbrella shading him from the hot sun of the south of France, a formidable, even regal presence in sunglasses and blue-and-white traditional African clothes. His hair is short and gray; his signature pipe, metal-trimmed with a long stem and a deep wooden bowl, is never far from his hands.

If all Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene were doing at the Festival de Cannes was accepting the respects of cineastes for a legendary career, it would be reason enough to celebrate. The 81-year-old Sembene is more than just an African director, he is the African director, for four decades the most significant force in that continent’s filmmaking history. His uncompromising but always emotionally connected films have won awards around the world, including Cannes, Venice, Moscow, Karlovy Vary and Addis Ababa. In Africa’s Francophone film community, he is “l’aine des anciens,” the elder of elders, someone whose passion and commitment to societal change have inspired filmmakers and infuriated governments in Europe as well as at home.

But Sembene, whose nature is always to look forward, was not in France to relive past glories. He was presenting a new film, “Moolaade,” translated as “Protection.” Selected for the New York Film Festival and scheduled for a fall U.S. release, it’s his ninth feature and one that has a typically up-to-the-minute subject.

That would be Africa’s plague of female genital mutilation, a practice that the World Health Organization estimates puts 2 million girls at risk annually and about which the director says with finality, “It has to be done away with.”

Sembene is like that -- there is a sense of energy, of urgency about him, even seated under that umbrella, and when he talks about what drew him to “Moolaade,” he is direct and to the point. “It is not a question of muse, of inspiration,” he says, his mellifluous French echoing through a translator. “I am about reality. My reference point is my people. What I do comes from and is inspired by them. The most important thing is to be able to speak to Africa. Whatever the subject matter, it has to be appropriate to Africa.”

While Sembene’s words can sound didactic, he knows that “a film should not be a political tract,” and it is his gift as a filmmaker to be able to have it both ways: to make motion pictures that easily blend social concerns with a gift for engrossing, humanistic storytelling.

Sembene’s films are the way they are because the man is the way he is, someone who had complex and intense life experiences before he directed his first feature, 1966’s “Black Girl,” at the relatively advanced age of 43.

The director served in the Free French Army during World War II, took part in a landmark Dakar-Niger railroad strike in 1947 and then went to France, where he worked on the docks of Marseille for 10 years and became an active trade unionist with a Marxist bent.

Sembene was first drawn to fiction writing, in part because he felt the lack of accurate depictions of the African experience. His first novel, “The Black Docker,” appeared in 1956. Several more followed, but in the early 1960s, Sembene decided to turn his attention to filmmaking and attended the Gorki Institute in Moscow, where he studied under Soviet directors Mark Donskoi and Sergei Gerasimov.

This focus on film came in part because Sembene felt that non-African films on Africa were a joke: “We have had enough,” he once said, “of feathers and tom-toms.” More significantly, Sembene knew that to reach his fellow Senegalese, many of whom were illiterate, film was the most potent medium, in effect “the people’s night school.”

For the same reason, Sembene eventually took the then unheard-of step of abandoning French, Senegal’s official language, and making films in his country’s indigenous tongues. His 1968 “Mandabi,” for instance, was the first film to be made by an all-African crew in a native African language (in this case Wolof), and his subsequent films have been made in Wolof, Diola or, with “Moolaade,” Bambara.

Everyday rhythms

Firsts are something of a tradition with Sembene. His 1962 short, “Borom Sarret,” is considered the first black film to be widely screened outside the continent, and the groundbreaking “Black Girl” extended his influence and range.

The harrowing story of a young African woman who arrives in France to work as a domestic and finds herself progressively dehumanized, “Black Girl” won the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo and was the first black African film to premiere at Cannes. The influential French critic George Sadoul wrote, “thanks to Sembene, the Black Continent has at last a say in the history of the moviemaking world.”

Yet talking about his honors and his importance, which bores Sembene, also tends to obscure the empathetic qualities that make his work so remarkable. With their ability to easily graft the often deliberate pace of African life and speech onto film, Sembene’s pictures confer dignity on the rhythms of the everyday. Confident of what he has to say, his pacing is unhurried. His tales seem to almost tell themselves.

In fact, Sembene can be seen in the role of a griot, a traditional African figure who is part storyteller and poet, part historian and wise man, wanting most of all to be the voice of his often unheard people.

“What we understand best in Africa is the reality of human beings,” Sembene explained in Cannes. “In the U.S., when you talk about drama, you are talking about speech. For me in my cinema, it is how men and women react, what they do, not what they say.”

The importance of this connection to reality leads to Sembene’s well-known preference for amateur actors. “Professionals are very good, but nonprofessionals bring it more alive, bring it closer to daily reality,” he says. But using them is not without its drawbacks.

“Casting is very difficult, because everyone is under the illusion they know about acting,” the director says with a rare smile. “Africans are very, very talkative. By contrast, the cinema is mathematical, with moments of silence, and the most difficult thing is having Africans be silent. But once someone remains silent you can gauge if they’re happy or not by the way they move or look, the way they raise a finger.”

When the kind of accessibility that Sembene values is combined with his absolute determination to make socially conscious films no matter what the cost, the result is a history of features that have riled governments fearful of his messages getting wide dissemination.

Sembene’s 1977 “Ceddo,” a historical drama about the resistance of the common people to the ruthless imposition of Islam by the ruling class, was banned in Senegal for eight years. His 1971 “Emitai,” which dealt with French colonialism, was, according to “The Oxford History of World Cinema,” “kept out of circulation for five years by the French.” And Sembene’s best known film, “Xala,” a comedy about sexual impotence that by implication criticized the impotence of official society, was heavily censored in Senegal on its release in 1975.

“Moolaade,” Sembene’s latest, looks to be equally controversial at home, where, the film’s press material says, “female genital mutilation is practiced in 38 of 54 member states of the African Union.” It is the second film of a project trilogy (the first was 2000’s “Faat Kine”) that deals with what Sembene describes as the strength and heroism of women in daily life.

“A lot of positive things are being done by women in Africa,” he says before adding, with palpable disgust, “while the men are killing themselves and each other.”

Ambassador of film

Sembene has with typical shrewdness set up “Moolaade” as a conflict between African traditions. On one side is the “purification” ceremony of genital mutilation, which adherents erroneously believe is sanctioned by Islamic teachings. On the other is the long-standing right of anyone to seek sanctuary or protection (moolaade) from a neighbor. In the film, four young girls who are fleeing a ceremony are granted moolaade from a woman who is an opponent of mutilation, causing an unprecedented uproar in the village.

Before he began filming, Sembene spent four years traveling and doing research on the subject. “My people know me,” he explains. “Without being pretentious, they trust me with their secrets. So I have to do work they can identify with. That is my heaviest responsibility.”

As for those who disagree with his point of view or don’t want to discuss the subject, Sembene is equally implacable. “Africa no longer has the right to hide from itself, to be in denial,” he says. “When Africa lies to itself, that is my job, to make a film so you can see a reflection of Africa.”

Now that “Moolaade” is finished, Sembene will begin a process that is traditional with him, personally taking his films to cities and towns in Senegal and participating in discussions after they are shown.

“Yes, despite my age, I still do it,” Sembene says with the briefest hint of weariness. “That’s because I think the way people react is more important than what you guys [journalists and critics] say.”

A director who continues to resist putting his films on video and DVD, Sembene underlines that “for me, what is important is collective viewing of films. There’s nothing more pleasant than seeing a group reaction, hearing an audience breathe in a room. The film catches their attention, there is a direct connection because it is their lived experience. You can learn a lot.”

With time for just one more question, I decide to ask Sembene about one of the more unexpected aspects of his history, the reported influence “Olympia,” Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi-supported record of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, had on his desire to become a filmmaker.

“Yes, I saw it when I was 15 or 16. It was really well made, with the most beautiful images, it influenced me a lot,” the director says, smiling at the unexpectedness of the memory and then topping it with one of his own.

“In 1972 I was hired to make a film about the Munich Olympics. I was sitting at a table with Leni Riefenstahl when Jesse Owens [the African American track star whose four 1936 gold medals infuriated Hitler] came over too. Someone took a picture of the three of us. It’s my favorite photograph.”