Safi Faye
1. Safi Faye:
Nationality: Senegalese. Born: Dakar, Senegal, 1943. Education: Primary school in Dakar; Normal School in Rufisque, Senegal, Teacher's Certificate, 1962; studied ethnology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris; trained as a filmmaker at the Louis Lumière Film School, graduated 1974; University of Paris VII, Doctorate in Ethnology, 1979; studied video production in Berlin, 1979–80. Family: Divorced; one daughter: Zeiba. Career: School teacher, 1963–69; actress in Jean Rouch's Petit à petit ou les Lettres Persanes, 1970; actress in her own short film La Passante, 1972; released her first full-length docudrama, Kaddu Beykat, 1975, which spearheaded her subsequent career as ethnologist-filmmaker. As film maker/director: A pioneer woman director in the male-dominated realm of African cinema, Safi Faye is today, with a career spanning more than 25 years, the best-known independent African female filmmaker. Safi Faye met the French ethnologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch at the 1966 Dakar Festival of Negro Arts. Rouch encouraged Faye to engage in cinema and seemingly triggered her subsequent use of the camera as an investigative and pedagogical tool in ethnographic filmmaking, which, to this date, represents the bulk of her cinematic output.
2. Films as Director:
1972
La Passante (The Passerby) (+ ro)
1973
Revanche (Revenge)
1975
Kaddu beykat (The Voice of the Peasant)
1979
Fad'jal; Goob na ñu (The Harvest Is In)
1980
Man Sa Yay (I, Your Mother)
1981
Les âmes au soleil (Souls under the Sun)
1982
Selbé et tant d'autres (Selbe and So Many Others)
1983
3 ans 5 mois (Three years five months)
1984
Ambassades nourricières (Culinary Embassies)
1985
Elsie Haas, femme peintre et cinéaste d'Haiti (Elsie Haas, Haitian Woman Painter and Filmmaker); Racines noires (Black Roots)
1989
Tesito
1996
Mossane
3. Reflections:
I could not find any clips of any of Safi’s movies to post on any websites that I visited, but here is a website about her 1996 movie Mossane: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117088/
4. Location:
I found Safi’s name on the Wikipidea website for women directors. She is a well-known African independent filmmaker so there were a few websites I could go to that provided a lot of information about her. The website that had the most information on her was filmreference.com.
5. Research:
I wanted to find a female filmmaker from Ghana specifically, but that was very hard to find and the only results I could get were about male filmmakers. I also tried looking into other women filmmakers before I chose Safi Faye, but I could not find much information on them. That led me to Safi who had more information written about her than the others.