Afrique sur Seine

This film is widely regarded as the first film made by an African south of the Sahara. Labelled an “ethnological documentary in reverse,” it shows 1950s Paris from the cinematic perspective of a group of African immigrants. The Senegalese director Paulin Soumanou Vieyra made a huge contribution to the emergent field of African filmmaking and African film theory. He made over a dozen films, and wrote a number of books, including the seminal work Le Cinema et L’Afrique. —african.cam.ac.uk