Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman’s Sembène! (2015) is the latest of a large number of tributes that have appeared since the death of Ousmane Sembène in June 2007. The 88-minute documentary, completed in January 2015 after a five-year production period that included several fund-raising ventures, has been featured at Sundance, Cannes, and numerous other festivals around the world. It is an eloquent, touching, and fitting tribute to a man who dedicated himself to promoting genuine images of the African continent for close to fifty years. Sembène! features vivid archival clips and lively, dramatic interviews that present a set of life-defining encounters between the Francophone scholar and his colonial past, between the Francophone novelist and his elusive audience, and among the African filmmaker, his peers, and his biographer. Each one gives us a portrait of a celebrated yet lonely artist confronting his destiny. The documentary ends on Gadjigo’s moving promise to keep the memory of Ousmane Sembène alive.

The film is structured around a series of homecomings. In the first part Gadjigo returns to Galle Ceddo, Sembène’s house, four years after the death of the filmmaker. The camera follows him in slow motion through the sandy streets of Yoff, past the unfinished walls of decrepit buildings, and finally facing the padlocked doors of Galle Ceddo. Tucked in a corner of the beach by the sea, it has become a desolate sight covered in thick layers of dust. Paintings and posters that used to adorn the home have disappeared or dangle precariously from the walls. Gone are the cherished life-size portraits of Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Kwame Nkrumah that used to look down imposingly on visitors. Sembène’s bookshelf, housing his precious reference volumes, is now buried in cobwebs. But most disheartening of all is the sight of his beloved jeans jacket, in which he was frequently attired on the sets of his films. As if fixated on the decay, the camera pans back and forth, up and down the walls. On the paved yard just a few steps from the billowing ocean Gadjigo and a few others laboriously attempt to pry open rusted metallic cases containing the original copies of films such as Ceddo (1977) and Xala (1975). As the camera lingers on the blue waters of the Atlantic, it clearly expresses the threats that any ageing artist in the postcolony must feel: the preservation of your work, the archiving of your creations, the safeguarding of your correspondence and papers are not a state priority. For most decision-makers, daily tribulations and arduous struggles to stay afloat overshadow such considerations.

The second part of the film uses archival footage to return to the early life of Ousmane Sembène—his family background, including the legacy of his rebellious father, and his first professional and politically militant experiences. Accompanied by voiceover narration from Sembène himself, the scenes show us his adolescence, his ejection from school, his fierce independence and even occasional experiences of vagrancy. As pictured by Gadjigo and Silverman, Sembène, the avid reader and card-carrying Communist, comes across as an artist unconditionally committed to social change, a black man eagerly reaching out to artists of the diaspora, an African writer and filmmaker for whom literature and cinema provide unique opportunities to communicate creatively with one’s compatriots. Sembène’s testy relationships with the actors on the set of Moolaade (2004) are also amply documented in this section.

Throughout the interviews shown in this film—and indeed, in conference and panel presentations throughout his career—Ousmane Sembène never ceased to affirm his dislike for wait-and-see attitudes and his freedom of thought and action. The third part of the documentary tells the story of the price he paid for such radical positions, as well as his own foibles. Gadjigo vividly recounts the banning of Ceddo (1977) in Senegal and the ten long years it took for Camp de Thiaroye (1988) to be shown in France. He also candidly discusses the story behind the much maligned Camp de Thiaroye (1988) and how a bitterly disappointed Boubacar Boris Diop lost his screenplay to Sembène. But perhaps more poignant is the fact that the co-directors of this documentary could not or would not interview Ben Diogaye Beye, who had initially been chosen as the director of what was supposed to be Diop’s film on the Thiaroye massacre. Whatever the case, this return to things past gives hints as to why one of the most celebrated filmmakers on the continent is also one of the most controversial, if not actively disliked, filmmaker among his Senegalese peers.

The end, it is often said, does not justify the means. Not so for Ousmane Sembène. Amid musings on his personal ambitions as a filmmaker he bluntly states that he would be willing to sleep with a devil (of either sex) to make his films. Sembène! suggests that filmmaking in Africa is a gut-wrenching, friendless enterprise. Egoes are bruised, families are disrupted, and personal safety is compromised. Ousmane Sembène may have been an extreme case, but similar patterns can be found in the careers of Med Hondo, Djibril Diop Mambety, Momar Thiam, Ababacar Samb Makharam, Sotigui Kouyate, and even Ben Diogaye Beye.

The documentary ends with the consecration of an ageing filmmaker in cities and venues around the world and among fans whose appreciation he had not even dreamed of: Danny Glover, Gordon Parks, Henry Louis Gates, Angela Davis, and large groups of the African diaspora in New York, Paris, London, and Toronto. Ousmane Sembène is seen joyfully ambling in and out of lectures halls, exchanging jokes and accolades with his audience. Yet such achievement appears all the more poignant as we observe the health of “the father of African cinema” declining. His sight had become so weak that he needed to be shepherded through the streets of Paris, his body so frail that he no longer could bear the rigor of filming days on end in hot dusty locations in the Sahel. Yet at least for a while it seemed that nothing could stop this indomitable spirit, until he collapsed on the set of Moolade (2004).

At his funeral in the Muslim cemetery of Dakar, just a stone’s throw from the beaches he used to frequent with his children, we see a glum looking Cheikh Oumar Cissokho walking behind the coffin, a grief-stricken Clarence Delgado being led away from the grave by friends, and a silent Ben Diogaye Beye looking on. As the echoes of the Islamic prayers die down, Gadjigo vows to keep the memory of his friend alive.

Gadjigo and Silverman’s Sembène! is a dutiful devoir de mémoire, tactfully yet candidly executed and generously offered to posterity. It is a fitting tribute to one of the most celebrated filmmakers on the continent, and a most valuable pedagogical resource.