SAFI FAYE, THE PIONEER

Safi Faye, born november 22 1943 is a major figure of African Cinema, a great Senegalese filmmaker and ethnologist.  Safi Faye graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Rufisque in Senegal. She worked briefly as a teacher before landing a role in the film Petit à petit (1971) by French anthropologist Jean Rouch. Safi started working on her vocation, writing, crafting and making films.

 

She trained in cinematography at the Louis Lumière school in Paris (1969-1980), took ethnology and anthropology classes from EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and defended in 1979 a doctoral thesis on the religion of the Sereer. 

Safi Faye is a pioneer of African cinema. She researched and wrote extensively on her culture, the Senegalese social fabric and women’s conditions with rural life as a backdrop. In a 2006 interview with M’barek Housni, she said that she wanted to give the floor to her kinfolk, to write for the African peasantry. Safi made her first feature film in 1975, Kaddu Beykat. It was awarded many distinctions among others, the Best first film award at the Festival de Cannes in 1976 .

Safi’s work is at the same time poetic and realistic, she wanted to subscribe to the lineage of Senegalese authors in cinema whose work are “still valuable, are undated and become classics”. To Safi, researching and writing is demanding, minute. She spent 8 years in the making of Mossane and had to fight some more years for the rights of her film to  be given back to her.

Cinema allowed Safi Faye to write for her mother, 'she had never been to school'. She wrote films for her mother to be able to read, “je voulais écrire pour qu'elle lise”. 

She made overall 13 films, an essential contribution to World cinema and an invaluable legacy for the next generations of women filmmakers, from Senegal, Africa and beyond.

Safi Faye died on February 22 2023, after a fulfilled life, that of a fighter and a creative who devoted her life to cinema, to show Africa on other terms and to document the living conditions of women.

Ndeye Debo Seck

This article  was originally published in the website of the CineFemFest