This hilarious and incisive comedy by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, the “father of African cinema,” is a critical observation and dissection of present-day Dakar, a post-colonial city dealing with modern contradictions in a transnational landscape where shifting gender relations, poverty and wealth, tradition and modernity are central problems. Faat Kine, a gas station operator born symbolically in the year of Senegalese independence (1960), has to confront the paternalistic attitudes of men, even though the health of the African economy and society depends on women. As Sembène has repeated, this is a tribute to the “everyday heroism of African women,” showing the central role women are playing in the creation of a new Africa far from that of pre-independence. Read an essay about filmmaker Sembène here.