My Life Is Wind (A Letter). 2024. USA/Sweden. Written and directed by Anahita Ghazvinizadeh. With Sara Hosseini Kolkou, Zahia Salloum, Orion Orrico, Melinda Jean Myers. DCP. In Arabic, English; English subtitles. 33 min.
La noire de… (Black Girl). 1963. France/Senegal. Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène. With Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne-Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine. DCP. In French; English subtitles. 59 min.
Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl is one of the most powerful directorial debuts in film history. The plot is simple, yet politically charged: A young Senegalese woman is picked by a wealthy French woman to travel to France and work as a maid in her bourgeois apartment, where the young woman finds herself trapped in servitude—the segregation and enslavement of the postcolonial world in miniature. In My Life Is Wind (A Letter), Iranian American director Anahita Ghazvinizadeh exposes the alienation of a Middle Eastern refugee in the US Midwest through a letter written to a grandmother she left behind.