Support

Help us celebrate cinematic excellence! Give a gift towards the Sydney Film Festival and inspire generations to come.

Support

Keep TFF Alive: Your donation will ensure the Travelling Film Festival can return to play a vital role in the recovery of our community and our local film industry.

Learn how you can help

Become a Director's Patron

Play Trailer

Borom Sarret

Directed by Ousmane Sembène

1963

Senegal, France

18 minutes

Unclassified 15+

Borom Sarret (SFF 2015) is Ousmane Sembène’s debut film, often hailed as one of the most significant short films ever made – and one that paved the way for African cinema.

Borom Sarret (Wolof name for “wagoner”) is the story of a poor cart driver who loses almost everything he owns in a single day. He offers people rides into town, and only sometimes do they pay him the fare. He gets confronted by a rich customer demanding to be taken to a suburb where horse driven carts are prohibited and inevitably the police stop him and confiscate his cart. This portrait of a working man recalls neorealist classics such as Bicycle Thieves and marked the arrival of a major new talent.

Mr. Sembène gives us a pointed and poignant view of the struggle for existence in Dakar's lower depths in the 19-minute Borom Sarret

A.H. Weiler, The New York Times

Borom Sarret is about a cartman, hard pressed for cash, who during a typical day makes no money, performs a few simply human services, worries about his horse, exhibits a callousness that seems quite reasonable and finally loses his cart after breaking a law left over from colonialism

Roger Ebert