WHEN the interview is over and the tape recorder is shut off at last, a grateful Father of African Cinema declares himself free to smoke. The filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, loosely draped in a striped cotton shirt and trousers, starts to becloud his Park Avenue hotel room with the aid of a gnarled, bent-stem pipe. He's warming up a reply, it seems, to the question he has evaded for an hour: What price has he paid for his career in films?
Now a vigorous 78, Mr. Sembene (pronounced sem BEN) has spent decades creating his own remarkable films and, simultaneously, the cinematic infrastructure of sub-Saharan Africa. He has trained technicians, established a distribution network, made ordinary citizens into actors, mentored other filmmakers. When an interviewer asks him to look back, he politely refuses to discuss his headaches: the run-ins with two governments (of Senegal and France), the necessities of self-financing and shipping film overseas for processing, the long gaps between productions. But, with a heavy fragrance hovering in the hotel room, he chuckles at the memory of a physical threat.
The danger, encountered during the shooting of his 1992 film, "Guelwaar," could easily have come from a religious group. He had made light of the friction between Senegal's Muslim majority and the country's Roman Catholics, yet no harm arose from those quarters. Nor was Mr. Sembene bullied by the Francophone elite (a frequent butt of his satire) or by the particular target of "Guelwaar," the profiteers who fatten themselves on Western handouts to Africa. The attackers, who surrounded him in a rural village, were bees. While on location, Mr. Sembene recalls, he lit his pipe under just the wrong tree and brought down a swarm on his head.
So he finally owns up, with a laugh, to a bruising share of "everyday heroism" -- the sort of valor practiced by the title character of his new film, "Faat-Kine."
Opening March 28 at Film Forum -- its run will overlap with a nine-film Sembene retrospective there (April 6 to April 26) -- "Faat-Kine" glows with the high spirits of a woman who has overcome half a lifetime of abuse. Born in 1960, the year of Senegal's independence from France, Faat-Kine (Venus Seye) is seduced and abandoned on two separate occasions, barred from school, and disinherited. Her father tries to set her on fire; her mother prays for her death; and after she nevertheless lives to see 40, Faat-Kine suffers fresh wounds from her grown daughter, who belittles the way she earns her living.
Having risen from a job as a gasoline pump jockey, Faat-Kine now manages a Dakar service station. It's a place that "symbolizes the energy of life," Mr. Sembene says, while also suggesting "a man's world, where the language is very crude." By working there -- and not just working, but ruling from behind a spotless desk -- "Faat-Kine subverts the society of the past."
"She establishes her own independence," Mr. Sembene adds, and does it so well that the film ends with a close-up of her feet in bed, toes wiggling with pleasure.
In each scene leading to that happy ending, Faat-Kine demonstrates yet another aspect of Mr. Sembene's conviction that "Africa's society and economy are held together today by women."
"But how can women have these responsibilities and yet be denied the same privileges as men?" he says. "That's the problem."
It's a problem that has evidently touched Mr. Sembene's audience. When "Faat-Kine" opened in Dakar, Senegal's capital, last May, he says, "All the women came."
"Whether in Senegal or Gabon, Cameroon, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, it was women who patronized the film. They told me that my depiction didn't begin to reach the level of suffering of African women. And for a month, women came flooding to see me. Some of them even brought along their husbands!"
Can the continent's most celebrated filmmaker be so accessible?
"Why should I hide, after I've made my films? Everybody knows where I live. I don't have a housekeeper in Dakar. My house doesn't have a gate.
"You see, every one of my projects begins with research -- because how can I know anything, unless people tell me? 'Faat-Kine' required a lot of this research, since there are three generations in the film: the mother, who symbolizes traditional society, the daughter, who is modernity, and Faat-Kine herself at the confluence. To understand the experience of women in African society, the contradictions in their lives between past and present, I had to talk with people -- because, after all, I'm not a woman."
For similar reasons, Mr. Sembene personally takes his films to cities and villages throughout Senegal, "because it's very important to talk with the public wherever the film goes," he said.
"It's what I call the traveling cinema. You don't make a lot of money out of it, but at least you get ideas. I have to be with the public -- because, if I claim to speak on behalf of the people, then I have to be accountable to them."
Out of this desire for conversation grew Mr. Sembene's career in film -- and with it a large part of the cinema of sub-Saharan Africa.
Born in 1923 in the Casamance region, Mr. Sembene left school at 15, supported himself in Dakar as a plumber and bricklayer and at 19 enlisted in De Gaulle's forces, with which he fought in France and Germany. It was not the last combat he was to see. After the war, he spent a decade as a union activist and Communist militant in Senegal and France.
With the publication of his books "The Black Docker" (1956) and "God's Bits of Wood" (1960), Mr. Sembene left behind manual labor and claimed his place as an important African novelist. But he was a novelist working in French, in a new nation where the most popular tongue, Wolof, was only starting to take written form and where most of the population could not read at all. Calculating that a book could speak to 10,000 people at most, whereas a movie might reach 1 million, Mr. Sembene left for Moscow and a year's training at the state film school. By 1963, he was back in Senegal, 40 years old and ready to start the major part of his career.
Since then, Mr. Sembene has made a handful of shorts and eight features, counting "Faat-Kine." These include delicious urban satires, overflowing with incidental characters and local color ("Mandabi" and "Xala"); a modern-day political murder mystery, set in a shady village ("Guelwaar"); rural period pieces, done in quasi-folkloric style, about the early and late colonial eras ("Ceddo" and "Emitai"); and even a based-on-a-true-story epic of David Lean dimensions, "The Camp at Thiaroye," about a French massacre of African troops at the end of World War II.
If these films seem astonishingly varied in style, period and setting, they also share certain strategies that date from silent movies, or for that matter the era of hieroglyphics. Wanting to convey legible ideas about his society and needing to communicate them across language barriers, Mr. Sembene constructed a cinema in which gestures, props and settings are all made to speak.
His first feature, "Black Girl" (1966), told its story not only through the protagonist's voiceover narration but also, and more emphatically, through elements like her choice of clothes. (In defiance of her white, French employers, the title character insists on wearing a fancy outfit while doing housework, to show she's more than a maid.) "Faat-Kine" finds Mr. Sembene still deploying these strategies -- for example, by showing women in traditional dress parading through concrete high-rises, bearing brightly colored plastic buckets on their heads.
USED by a lesser artist, such hieroglyphs would be just that: inanimate stick figures. But Mr. Sembene's cinema of conversation brings irrepressible life to his characters; and in retrospect, the loving attention he's devoted to the women among them is fully evident. The modern, educated daughter of Faat-Kine has her counterpart in the outspoken young daughter of a bureaucrat in "Xala," and in the princess who solves her village's problems more directly than any man would dare in "Ceddo."
The "everyday heroism" of Faat-Kine herself can be traced back to the widow in "Guelwaar," addressing a bitter monologue to her husband's empty clothes; to the scuffling wives in "Mandabi," working around their improvident husband as best they can; to the rebellious village women of "Emitai," standing up (as the men will not) to murderous French authority; and even to the wife in a short film, "Borom Sarret," who tartly assures her husband that he'll eat tonight -- exactly how, he'd rather not know.
What's new in "Faat-Kine" is a wholehearted endorsement of its heroine's entrepreneurship. Isn't she a bit like a filmmaker -- at least, the kind of filmmaker who raises money on his own and tours the countryside with his movies?
Mr. Sembene turns aside the suggestion, as he does all other hints about his own brave persistence. But before the interview ends, he willingly goes on the record about political change:
"Forty years ago, we had nothing -- no doctors, no engineers, no writers. We had no university. We thought a flag and a national anthem were enough for independence; and we thought we could count on the government. That is now a thing of the past. One has to count on the people. And despite all the problems, success for us is a certainty. Every day we're working hard, because we're dreaming of a better quality of life. And that is Faat-Kine -- someone who wins out through a daily struggle."
The proof? During the presidential run-off election last March, when Abdoulaye Wade of the Senegalese Democratic Party, an opposition party leader for 26 years, unseated Abdou Diouf of the Socialist Party of Senegal, "It was the women who changed the entire order of things," Mr. Sembene says. "When they held a protest march in the streets, everything was frozen. It's a new power for women in our society."
GRAPHIC: Photos: A scene from Ousmane Sembene's 1971 film "Emitai." (Film Forum/New Yorker Films)(pg. 27); The Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene in New York last fall. His new film, "Faat-Kine," with Mariama Balde, at left, and Mame Ndoumbe, will be shown at Film Forum. (New Yorker Films); (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)(pg. 15)