Sembene!
Logline
Meet Ousmane Sembene, the celebrated father of African cinema and a freedom fighter who used stories as his means of empowerment, cultural resistance, and renewal.
Samba Gadjigo - Director, Producer, Screenwriter
Samba Gadjigo wrote the biography Ousmane Sembene: Une Conscience Africaine (Homnispheres, Paris, 2007), which covers Sembene's life from his birth in 1923 to the writing of his first book in 1956, and is scheduled for release in English by the University of Indiana Press in 2010. Gadjigo currently serves a member of the French, African American, and African Studies departments at Mount Holyoke College. He is director of the documentary The Making of Moolaade.
Jason Silverman - Director, Producer, Screenwriter
Jason Silverman produced the award-winning films Shameless (Great Plains Film Festival) and Olympia (SXSW, Slamdance, Sundance Channel). He is currently Director of the Cinematheque at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Edwina White - Art Director
As an illustrator, Edwina White has won awards from Folio and New York Art Directors, and has created illustrations for Harpers Bazaar, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair and others. She is represented by Kinz, Tillou + Feigen in New York.
Sembene! celebrates a revolutionary artist who recognized that cultural survival depends on the reclamation of story. His life is recounted by a fictional, animated narrator — a wise old man — to a courtyard of youth, revealing the mechanics of the modern media and inspiring the revival of culturally rich storytelling.
