When I first heard the subject of Film Forum’s latest retrospective, it filled me with dread. “Sembène,” which begins a two-week run on Friday, features the work of the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, known as the “Father of African Cinema,” an appellation that frequently induces instant boredom.

My general assumption about African film was that it wallowed in misery and poverty and was technically underdeveloped, and in many ways, Sembène’s films don’t exactly disappoint my prejudiced expectations. The late director shot beautiful footage when he was outdoors, but the second he entered a building, things had a tendency to fall apart: Flat, overlit sets house stiffly posed actors who look as though they’re in a high school play. Sembène, who passed away in June at 84, was a lifelong Communist, and his earliest films often conclude with awkward speeches that sound like undergraduate thesis statements. And did I mention that most of his actors are amateurs? Hardly what I expected from “one of the most remarkable artists in the world,” as Newsweek calls him.

And then I saw “Guelwaar.”

This 1993 film about a funeral flashes the satirical teeth that most movie satires lack, and its appetite for destruction is so voracious that by the time the credits roll, it has managed to eviscerate the sanctity of the family, all major religions, and foreign aid dependency in Africa.

Maintaining a disarming, matter-of-fact tone, “Guelwaar” tells the story of a corpse that goes missing and, thanks to a mortuary mix-up, winds up being buried in a Muslim cemetery. Of course, the deceased is Roman Catholic, and it’s not long before his appalled family shows up and a Catholic-Muslim standoff becomes so nail-bitingly tense that I was left unprepared for the sudden act of humility that brings the story to a close and wraps a masterful piece of filmmaking. Was Sembène one of the most remarkable artists in the world? Maybe not, but certainly a director who will thrill the average ticket buyer if given a chance.

Born in Senegal in 1923, Sembène was expelled from his sixth-grade class after striking a teacher, then conscripted into the French army, which sent him to Europe to fight the Nazis. He returned and became a dockworker. After moonlighting as a novelist, he ditched books for filmmaking in order to better reach the masses. His first movie, “Black Girl” (1966), was the first African feature film with an African director, and it was a ferocious attack on both French colonialism and postcolonial Senegal.

Because he started directing at 40, Sembène’s two-fisted politics are tempered by a mellow maturity, and because he made his movies with local audiences in mind, they are populist without being patronizing. And they fall neatly into three camps: There are the dark social satires, such as “Xala” (1975), about a member of the postcolonial Chamber of Commerce who is cursed with impotence on the eve of his wedding to a third wife, and “Mandabi” (1968), which finds one man’s total destruction in his receipt of a money order. Then there are his historical epics, such as “Emitai” (1971), an account of a village massacre that was censored by the French government, and “Camp de Thiaroye” (1987), about the harsh fate that befalls the Senegalese in the French army. And finally there are the first two installments in his anticipated trilogy about Africa’s women, “Faat Kiné” (2000), a triumphant flick about a female gas-station owner, and “Moolaadé” (2004), about one woman’s opposition to female circumcision.

All of these films are deliberately paced, to say the least, but they reward patience. Sembène created a gallery of vibrant characters who collectively put a human face on Africa at a time when the continent needed it desperately. Makhouredia Gueye, the star of “Mandabi,” is delightfully vile; the movie opens with his nose being professionally picked, and an enormous dinner gives him a grotesque case of gas. After every financial setback he pops up again, as indestructible as Wile E. Coyote. In “Emitai,” the women barely have a line of dialogue among them, but their silence becomes eloquent and finally heroic in the face of their blustering husbands. And there’s a casual moment of fragile understanding in “Guelwaar” between a pompous Catholic priest and a prostitute who refuses to be ashamed of her job, which just about breaks your heart.

It is a pity that this well-deserved memorial to Sembène will only play in New York City. An artist of his caliber deserves a wider audience across America, both of African-Americans who may be a bit fuzzy on what the “African” part of their identity represents, and of white Americans who love Africa as an “issue” but possess little understanding of its people. Because if there is one thing Ousmane Sembène understood deeply and loved dearly, it was people.

Through December 13 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).