Fad'jal, Safi Faye, Senegal-France, 1979, 112'
The Senegalese filmmaker and ethnologist, Safi Faye (1943), is part of the second generation of free and independent women who grow in full cultural boil in Dakar, the capital of a newly independent country where she works as a teacher, sound engineer and actress to take out Ethnology studies go ahead. With just 20 years, at the Dakar Art Festival - the first African art festival that was organized in Senegal -, he meets Jean Rouch. With him he began a film career, first participating as an actress in the film Petit à Petit (1969), and later as director La Passante (1972), Letter from the Village (1975), Fad'jal (1979), Selbe (1983 ) or Mossane (1996).
Faye recognizes the importance of Rouch in her work. But unlike him, she refuses that western gaze that perceives Africans as “the other” or as a cultural object and allows him to redify African subjectivity and, like Sarah Maldoror, Faye, intends to reflect the battered African cultures in the It was colonial. That is why he makes films for Africans, and he addresses issues such as cultural difference, ethnicity, identity or migration from the perspective of a Senegalese woman. Its origin Serer, a peasant town with a great cultural heritage, and the doctorate of Ethnology and Anthropology at the Sorbonne, mark the genesis of a semi-autobiographical work where she is a participant observer and expresses the community giving voice to the people.
Safi Faye was the first woman in black Africa to make a feature film, Kaddu Beykat (1975), "words of hungry people," known internationally as Letter from the Village. This film that showed the misery of the people and criticized the policies of Léopold Sédar Senghor was censored for years in Senegal, however, it obtained great recognition and international distribution. In 1979, Fad’jal was premiered, a documentary fiction fruit of his doctoral thesis in which she portrayed the town where his parents were born, Fad’jal. Faye wanted to highlight the memory, the narration and the stories themselves, that had never been written. It turned out to be a masterpiece and the first African black film selected in Cannes.
Tania Adam is a journalist and a cultural producer. Founder of Radio África Magazine.
Safi Faye was the first woman in black Africa to make a feature film, Kaddu Beykat (1975), "words of hungry people," known internationally as Letter from the Village.