Throughout the four decades of his great career--which is the same thing as saying, throughout the history of filmmaking in sub-Saharan Africa--Ousmane Sembene has switched back and forth between urban and rural settings, historic and contemporary subjects, as if striving to encapsulate the whole of his continent's experience. Most recently, in Faat Kiné, he dramatized the entrepreneurial and familial struggles of a Dakar woman, who had worked her way up into the middle class by running a gas station. His new film, Moolaadé, focuses instead on a village far from any paved roads, where women still draw water from a well and news travels by drum. From your first view of the dried-mud architecture--the round granaries set on foundations of round stones, the mosque with its stringy towers sticking up like an anthill's peaks--you understand you're in a place bound by tradition. Yet this place is also permeable to modernity, which enters the movie as soon as you do.

The first images in Moolaadé show the arrival of a peddler known as Mercenaire (Dominique T. Zeïda), who wheels into the village a bicycle cart laden with store-made clothes, bakery bread, bright-colored plastic housewares and the most prized item of all: alkaline batteries.

Another intrusion of modernity follows immediately, even as Mercenaire sets out his wares. Into one of the village's compounds dash four skinny little girls dressed in nothing but blue shorts. Weeping and gasping, they beg for sanctuary from Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), who is the second of this household's three wives. The children understand that she alone might take pity on them, now that they have run away from the rite their elders call "purification." The girls have a more basic name for it: "getting cut."

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