Safi Faye

Safi Faye was born in 1943 in Dakar, Senegal, to an aristocratic Serer family.[1] Her parents, the Fayes, were from Fad'jal, a village south of Dakar.[2] She attended the Normal School in Rufisque and receiving her teaching certificate in 1962 or 1963, began teaching in Dakar.[2][3]

In 1966 she went to the Dakar Festival of Negro Arts and met French ethnologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch.[3] He encouraged her to use film making as an ethnographic tool.[3] She had an acting role in his 1971 film Petit à petit.[4] Faye has said that she dislikes Rouch's film but that working with him enabled her to learn about filmmaking and cinéma-vérité.[5] In the 1970s she studied ethnology at the École pratique des hautes études and then at the Lumière Film School.[2][4] She supported herself by working as a model, an actor and in film sound effects.[2] In 1979, she received a PhD in ethnology from the University of Paris.[1] From 1979 to 1980, Faye studied video production in Berlin and was a guest lecturer at the Free University of Berlin.[6] She received a further degree in ethnology from the Sorbonne in 1988.[1]

Faye's first film, in which she also acted, was a 1972 short called La Passante (The Passerby), drawn from her experiences as a foreign woman in Paris.[1][7] It follows a woman (Faye) walking down a street and noticing the reactions of men nearby.[5] Faye's first feature film was Kaddu Beykat, which means The Voice of the Peasant in Wolof and was known internationally as Letter from My Village or News from My Village.[5] She obtained financial backing for Kaddu Beykat from the French Ministry of Cooperation.[2] Released in 1975, it was the first feature film to be made by a Sub-Saharan African woman to be commercially distributed and gained international recognition for Faye.[5][8] On its release it was banned in Senegal.[9] In 1976 it won the FIPRESCI Prize from the International Federation of Film Critics (tied with Chhatrabhang) and the OCIC Award.

Faye's 1983 documentary film Selbé: One Among Many follows a 39-year-old woman called Sélbe who works to support her eight children since her husband has left their village to look for work.[10] Selbé regularly converses with Faye, who remains off-screen, and describes her relationship with her husband and daily life in the village.[11]

Faye's films are better known in Europe than in her native Africa, where they are rarely shown.[6]

• Ellerson, Beti (2004). "Safi Faye's Gaze: The Evolution of an African Woman's Cinema". In Pfaff, Françoise (ed.). Focus on African Films. Indiana University Press. pp. 185–202. ISBN 978-0-253-21668-7.
• Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey (1995). Women Film Directors: An International Bio-critical Dictionary. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 130–132. ISBN 0-313-28972-7.
• Petrolle, Jean; Virginia Wright Wexman (2005). Women and Experimental Filmmaking. University of Illinois Press. pp. 177–192. ISBN 0-252-03006-0.
• Schmidt, Nancy J. (1999). "Sub-Saharan African Woman Filmmakers". In Harrow, Kenneth W. (ed.). African Cinema: Postcolonial and Feminist Readings. Africa World Press. ISBN 978-0-86543-697-8.
• Spaas, Lieve (2001). The Francophone Film: A Struggle for Identity. Manchester University Press. pp. 185–188. ISBN 0-7190-5861-9.
• Thackway, Melissa (2003). Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone. James Currey Publishers. pp. 151–155. ISBN 0-85255-576-8.
• Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank; Teshome H. Gabriel (2002). Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers. University of Minnesota Press. pp. 29–40. ISBN 0-8166-4004-1.