Two Films By Ousmane Sembene (15)

BFI, £19.99

Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène is known as “the Father of African cinema” and it's impossible to argue with the sobriquet. He was the first African director to turn his camera on real African lives and gain recognition for doing so, but as well as that achievement his films are notable for another quality: their unimpeachable authenticity.

It comes from his own life and early struggles. In 1937, aged 13, he was expelled from school for hitting a teacher. He then became a fisherman and later a manual labourer before joining the army to fight with the Free French in the second world. In 1946 he returned to Senegal where he worked on the railways and took part in Africa's first union-led strike. Then he went back to France by stowing away on board a ship bound for Marseilles. In the port city he found work as a docker and discovered Communism. An autodidact, he published his first novel in 1956 – The Black Docker, based on his experiences as a stevedore – and in 1962 headed for Moscow to study film-making.

He continued to write but his best known cinema works are Xala, from 1975, and Moolaadé, a film about female genital mutilation and a prize winner at the 2004 Cannes film festival. Gathered together in this impressive BFI collection are his first two films: 1963's Borom Sarret, a 20 minute short, and his debut feature Black Girl, from 1966.

The first follows a day in the life of a Dakar cart driver as he tries to earn money ferrying (variously) a pregnant woman to a maternity hospital, a grieving father and his dead child to a cemetery and a young black man with “contacts” to a swanky uptown address in the area of the city still largely occupied by the French, the former colonial power. He's stopped by the police, the young man disappears without paying him, his cart is impounded, he walks home penniless. Modern life is a form of slavery, says the man.

That same sense of barely-contained anger and injustice is evident in Black Girl, based on the 1958 suicide of a Senegalese maid employed by a French family in Antibes. As in Borom Sarret, most of the dialogue is delivered as interior monologue leaving actress Mbissine Thérèse Diop to drift impassively from kitchen to bedroom and back again. “For me, France is the kitchen,” she says as she wonders why she ever left Dakar and her family. It's simple, powerful and, for all the beauty of its serene star and its glamorous setting, desperately bleak. Among the many extras is an hour-long film about Sembene, and an interview with Diop herself.

The Firemen's Ball (PG)

Arrow Films, £15.99

Nine years before One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest won five Oscars at the 1976 Academy Awards, Milos Forman made his last film in his homeland, Czechoslovakia. This is it. Its notoriety - it was banned by the Communist authorities, with the proviso that the injunction stay in place “forever” - was one of the reasons he left for America in the first place, though the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring had a little to do with it as well.

On the face of it, The Fireman's Ball film is simply a comedy about a gala in a small country town. But when people keep pinching the raffle prizes (even the pig's head), when none of the local girls want to take part in the beauty contest (they run away and hide in the loos), when the elderly, uniformed firemen overseeing the whole shambles potter about aimlessly it's easy to see why the authorities sniffed the air and smelled a rat. Even a scene in which the gala is interrupted for an actual fire is pregnant with satirical intent: as the half-drunk fireman fight it by shovelling snow, an old man is saved from the burning building but turned away from the flames so he won't be reminded that his possessions are being torched. But then he's cold, so he's moved forward to warm up. Black farce served up with puckish verve.

The Connection (15)

Picturehouse Entertainment/Altitude Film Distribution, £15.99

Several films over several decades have dealt with the so-called “French Connection”, a scheme to export heroin to the US via Marseilles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. You may remember Gene Hackman in William Friedkin's 1971 version. This one, from Marseilles-born director Cedric Jimenez, is simply the latest. “Loosely based on real events” is how it's introduced but if the historical details have been tinkered with, the same isn't true of the milieu: Jimenez lovingly recreates 1970s Marseilles right down to the cars and the interior design. If nothing else, it looks great.

Jean Dujardin, star of The Artist, plays crusading magistrate Pierre Michel. Ranged against him is gangster Gaetan Zampa (Gilles Lellouche). The action starts in 1975 and runs forward into the early 1980s as Michel and Zampa battle it out. Too often, though, The Connection feels like a slick period piece with nothing to say about the present: Matteo Garrone's Gomorra, which tackles the modern-day Mafia clans head-on, is in a different league entirely.