Ousmane Sembene became the undisputed leader of African cinema when his first two features, Black Girl and Mandabi, earned international acclaim in the 1960s. During the next four decades he made such first-rate pictures as the fiercely anticolonial Ceddo and the darkly ironic Guelwaar, released in 1977 and 1992, and the 1975 political satire Xala, my choice for his greatest film. He completed the colorful and engaging Moolaadé in 2004, just three years before his death, and his talent proved to be as robust as ever. Reflecting the canny blend of folkloric style and political content that distinguishes many of his films, it gave his career a glowing finale.

The good-looking DVD edition from New Yorker Video includes a making-of featurette, interviews, and additional footage.

It's a mark of Sembene's ingenuity that a film about female circumcision – or genital mutilation, to use a blunter term – can be as winning and engrossing as Moolaadé. The story takes place in a village where half a dozen little girls, ranging in age from four to nine, are slated to undergo the procedure, which is horrifically painful at best and fatally infectious at worst, and carries such awful side effects as a lifelong inability to give birth normally. The girls are fully aware of what they're in for, and a couple of their friends have committed suicide rather than face the knives of the women who perform the operation. Their only hope is a neighbor named Collé who recognizes the "purification" ritual as the barbarity it is and rejected it for her own daughter several years earlier. Sympathizing with the girls' dilemma, she removes them from immediate danger by stringing a length of yarn across an entryway and announcing that the marked-off area is a sanctuary zone protected by moolaadé, a powerful kind of magic. This intimidates the local women, but the forces of reaction still run strong: Collé's husband (who also has another wife) tries to change her point of view with a whipping, and when a freethinking merchant intervenes, his reward is opprobrium and death. Meanwhile the smug, self-righteous mutilators come ever closer to the village and the victims who dread their arrival.

The film's most immediately obvious merit is the vivid camerawork by Dominique Gentil, who also photographed Guelwaar and Sembene's next-to-last picture, the 2000 dramatic comedy Faat Kiné. Like many Sembene films, Moolaadé is drenched in dazzling color; in less gifted hands this might have diluted the story's emotional power, but here it serves as a constant reminder of how fundamentally pleasant and enjoyable the villagers' lives are, and how much more so they could be without the stains of ignorance and superstition inherited from an earlier, less enlightened age. The nonprofessional cast gives the film another layer of authenticity, as does the trajectory of the story, which – as in other Sembene movies – flows more like a meandering river, often branching into subplots and digressions, than the straight-ahead canals of conventional film narratives. The use of nonprofessionals, the loose narrative structure, and other such qualities align Sembene's cinema with that of top-flight African filmmakers like Soulemane Cisse of Mali and Idrissa Ouedraogo of Burkina Faso, as well as the legendary French ethnographer Jean Rouch; yet even these fine artists have rarely surpassed Sembene's levels of skill and sensitivity.

The score by Boncana Maïga also contributes to the effectiveness of Moolaadé, as does the music emitted by scads of portable radios that get torched in one of the movie's most unexpected scenes, an African version of history's fabled bonfire of the vanities or the book-burnings in Germany during the Nazi era. It's likely that Sembene intended the links between such events in Moolaadé and episodes that scarred other countries in bygone times. A filmmaker with much political savvy, he was a soldier, manual laborer, factory worker, and trade-union organizer for many years before the success of a 1956 novel opened the artistic world to him; when he decided that movies would provide a more far-reaching platform for his ideas than novels and poems could, he did his film studies and apprenticeship in the Soviet Union – zipping through a five-year curriculum in two years – and returned to his native Senegal in 1963 to direct his first shorts. He was aware of his responsibilities as the first African director to reach both an African audience and an international one, and while he never stopped celebrating the richness of African history and culture, he refused to minimize the continent's chronic social and political ills, which he repeatedly traced to clashes between traditionalism and modernism in cultures afflicted for centuries by imperialism, colonialism, sectarian conflict, and authoritarian rule. It's no accident that Collé's son-in-law-to-be returns home from Paris decked out in a Western suit that looks faintly ridiculous in the village square. "The colonial system, wherever it is," Sembene told me in a 1990 interview, "is like a leech that lives from the blood of the people who are exploited. And they lose their identity....It's a disease, and even after it's cured, the symptoms remain."

Equally important, Sembene always rejected simplistic answers and pat solutions to the problems raised by his movies, since these wouldn't jibe with his view of human nature as a perennially puzzling, often self-contradictory affair – as Moolaadé attests by showing how a brutally misogynistic custom is enforced and perpetuated by the very women who have undergone its torments. Sembene also believed that a person's positions on public issues should be based on morality, not expediency. This explains why Collé acts on her convictions despite the maltreatment this will surely bring; she knows high principles often have high costs, and she's willing to pay them.

"Cinema is well suited to the African population," Sembene told me, because "it is connected to the oral tradition." This doesn't mean viewers there are unsophisticated, however – quite the opposite. "When the Senegalese audience sees American or French films," the director said, "they don't mind if it's purely entertainment. But when it sees Senegalese movies, the audience demands thinking movies. If you want to give them pure entertainment, without social content, they don't like it." In films with sensuous surfaces and provocative depths, Sembene satisfied that demand for more than forty years. His legacy is rich, and Moolaadé exemplifies it beautifully.

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by David Sterritt