AUBURN – L/A Arts and Central Maine Community College will present the film “Moolaade,” a tale of courage and beauty, Wednesday and Thursday, Feb. 1 and 2. It will be shown at 7 p.m. in Kirk Hall Auditorium at the college, 1250 Turner St.

Set in a modern-day African village, six young girls are to be circumcised. All the children know that the operation is horrible torture and sometimes lethal; all the adults know that some circumcised women can only give birth by Caesarean section. Two of the girls have drowned themselves in the well to escape the operation.

The four other girls seek “magical protection” (moolaade) from a woman named Colle who, seven years before, refused to have her daughter circumcised. The ensuing standoff pits Colle against village traditionalists, both male and female, and endangers the prospective marriage of her daughter.

Though the subject matter might seem weighty, this buoyant film is anything but. The director, Ousmane Sembene, places the action in a vibrant tapestry of village life and expands the narrative well beyond the bounds of straightforward realism. The film employs an imaginative array of metaphors, mythic overtones, and musical numbers. Winner of a Grand Prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, “Moolaade” was selected by many prominent critics as the best film of the entire festival.

The 81-year-old Sembene, African cinema’s founding father, continues to be its most fiery, provocative spirit. Extending the strong feminist consciousness that marked his previous triumph “Faat Kiné,” “Moolaade is,” as Chris Fujiwara of the Boston Phoenix describes it, “a forceful and beautiful feminist narrative whose relevance goes beyond its African context.”

This 2004 Senegal film is in color and approximately 124 minutes long. The movie is in Jula and French with English subtitles. It has not been rated.

Tickets are $7 ($5 for film club members.) This is the fourth of six films in this year’s International Film Series. For more information, people can contact L/A Arts at (207) 782-7228, www.laarts.org.