Having blazed a trail for African filmmakers to tell their own stories on-screen, Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène took his career-long project-to unlock cinema's potential as a vehicle for social change-in increasingly urgent and provocative directions in the 1970s. Searing critiques of colonialism, political corruption, patriarchal arrogance, and religious indoctrination, his three features from this decade-the radical call to resistance Emitaï, the wickedly subversive satire Xala, and the controversial historical epic Ceddo-confirmed his standing as a fearless truth-teller for whom the camera was the ultimate weapon in the fight against oppression in all it's forms.