Cinema of Senegal
Encyclopedia
The cinema of Senegal is a relatively small film industry
Film industry
The film industry consists of the technological and commercial institutions of filmmaking: i.e. film production companies, film studios, cinematography, film production, screenwriting, pre-production, post production, film festivals, distribution; and actors, film directors and other film crew...
which experienced its prime from the 1960s through to the early 1980s, but has since declined to less than five feature films produced in the last ten years.
Early films: 1955-1969
The first Senegalese film, Paulin Vieyra's L’Afrique sur Seine, was produced in 1955. Vieyra would follow up with further short films L’Afrique à Moscou (1957), Le Niger aujourd’hui (1958), Les présidents Senghor et Modibo Keita, Avec les Africaines à Vienne and "Présence Africaine" à Rome (1959) and Indépendance du Cameroun, Togo, Congo, Madagascar (1960), a documentary covering the independence of these countries.However it was not until the Independence of Senegal itself that the industry began to develop. Writer Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène , often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane in articles and reference works, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer...
, became one of the country's leading directors during this period by turning many of his short stories into films. He was particularly concerned with social change, and saw film as a way of reaching a wider audience. In 1963, Sembène produced his first film, a 20 minute short called Barom Sarret (The Wagoner). The film is often considered the first film ever made in Africa by a Black African and illustrates the poverty stricken life that was still prevalent in Senegal after independence by following the daily routine of a cab driver. In 1964 he made another short entitled Niaye. In 1966 he produced his first and Senegal's first feature film, La Noire de...
Black Girl (film)
Black Girl is a 1966 film by the Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène, starring Mbissine Thérèse Diop. Its original French title is La Noire de..., which means "The black girl of...", as in "someone's black girl". The film centers on a young Senegalese woman who moves from Senegal to...
, based on one of his own short stories; and it also became the first feature film ever released by a sub-Saharan African director. Though only 60 minutes long, the French-language film won him the Prix Jean Vigo
Prix Jean Vigo
The Prix Jean Vigo is an award in the Cinema of France given annually since 1951 to a French film director in homage to Jean Vigo. It was founded by French writer Claude...
,
bringing immediate international attention to both film in Senegal and African cinema generally. Sembène followed this success with the 1968 Mandabi, achieving his goal of producing a film in his native Wolof language
Wolof language
Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania, and is the native language of the Wolof people. Like the neighbouring languages Serer and Fula, it belongs to the Atlantic branch of the Niger–Congo language family...
.
1970s: "The Golden Years"
Through the 1970s the industry grew, with Sembène making a film in the Diola language and French entitled Emitai in 1971. Director Djibril Diop MambétyDjibril Diop Mambéty
Djibril Diop Mambéty was a Senegalese film director, actor, orator, composer and poet. Though he made only a small number of films, they received international acclaim for their original and experimental cinematic technique and non-linear, unconventional narrative style. Born to a Muslim family...
released a number of films during this period with deep social meaning and representation. Like many of his contemporaries, Djibril Diop Mambéty used the cinematic medium to comment on political and social conditions in Africa, and like Sembène his films were unconventional, surrealist, fast-paced, with social realist
Social realism
Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...
narratives. In his films, Mambéty confronted and engaged with complexities and contradictions in the emerging society in Senegal depicting hybridity
Hybridity
Hybridity refers in its most basic sense to mixture. The term originates from biology and was subsequently employed in linguistics and in racial theory in the nineteenth century. Its contemporary uses are scattered across numerous academic disciplines and is salient in popular culture...
. Djibril Diop Mambéty's earliest film, was a short entitled Contras City (1968), highlighting the contrasts of cosmopolitanism in Dakar's baroque architecture against the poverty-stricken areas. In 1970 Mambéty released his next short, Badou Boy, another cynical insight at Senegal's capital which depicts a non-conformist individual against a heavily caricatured policeman who pursues the protagonist through comedically improbable scenarios.
Touki Bouki
Touki Bouki is a 1973 Senegalese drama film, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. It was shown at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival....
(The Hyena's Journey) in 1973, in which commentators consider his most dynamic representation of hybridity and social isolation and juxtaposition in Senegal was made with a budget of $30,000, ironically partly funded by the Senegalese government.
The film features lovers, Mory and Anta, who symbolically fantasize about fleeing Dakar for a romanticized France, representing the changing situation in Senegalese society and the transition to a new era. Of Mambéty's contribution to Senegalese film during this period, Sheila Petty, a scholar in African Studies notes, "unlike other African filmmakers of the late 1960s and early 1970s whose films were structured around essentialist nationalist discourse focused on the binary opposition of African values versus cultural alienation, Mambéty sought to expose the diversity of real life".
Kaddu Beykat
Kaddu Beykat is a 1975 Senegalese film directed by Safi Faye. It was the first feature film made by a Sub-Saharan African woman to be commercially distributed and brought international recognition for its director...
, directed by Safi Faye
Safi Faye
Safi Faye is a Senegalese film director and ethnologist. She was the first Sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film. She has directed several documentary and fiction films focussing on rural life in Senegal.-Early life and education:Safi Faye was born in 1943 in...
and Xala
Xala
Xala is a 1975 Senegalese film directed by Ousmane Sembène. It is an adaptation of Sembène's own 1973 novel of the same name. The film depicts El Hadji, a politician in Senegal, who is cursed with crippling erectile dysfunction upon the day of his marriage to his third wife...
also by Sembene. Sembene, funded by the American film company New Yorker Films
New Yorker Films
New Yorker Films is an independent film distribution company founded by Daniel Talbot in 1965. It started as an extension of his Manhattan movie house, the New Yorker Theater, after he discovered he was unable to obtain certain foreign titles for exhibition....
produced Xala, a black comedy
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
which relates the story of El Hadji, an impotent politician in Senegal
Senegal
Senegal , officially the Republic of Senegal , is a country in western Africa. It owes its name to the Sénégal River that borders it to the east and north...
from the day of his marriage to his third wife. The film heavily satirizes corruption in African politics since independence with El Hadji's impotence symbolizing the failure of many of the governments to overcome greed.
He followed this with Ceddo (1977), a film which received much censorship within Senegal due to its subject matter.
Safi Faye, who first appeared in 1972 with her short film La Passante (The Passerby) in which she also starred, was encouraged by French ethnologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch
Jean Rouch
Jean Rouch was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.He is considered to be one of the founders of the cinéma vérité in France, which shared the aesthetics of the direct cinema spearheaded by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles...
to use film making as an ethnographic tool and persuaded her to pursue an education in film production. She studied ethnology at the École pratique des hautes études
École pratique des hautes études
The École pratique des hautes études is a Grand Établissement in Paris, France. It is counted among France's most prestigious research and higher education institutions....
and then at the Lumière Film School and raised money needed to produce films by accepting work as a model, an actor and in film sound effects. She received a PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in ethnology from the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
in 1979 and immediately began studying video production in Berlin. She obtained financial backing for Kaddu Beykat from the French Ministry of Cooperation and became the first feature film to be made by a Sub-Saharan African woman to be commercially distributed and gained international recognition. On its release however it was banned in Senegal. In 1976 it won the FIPRESCI
FIPRESCI
The International Federation of Film Critics is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world for "the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests." It was founded in June 1930 in...
Prize from the International Federation of Film Critics and the OCIC
SIGNIS
SIGNIS is a Roman Catholic lay ecclesial movement for professionals in the communication media, including radio, television, cinema, video, media education, Internet and new technology. It is a non-profit organization with representation from over 140 countries...
Award. She then released Fad'jal and Goob na nu in 1979.
Also in the 1970s, Ben Diogaye Bèye
Ben Diogaye Beye
Ben Diogaye Bèye is a Senegalese filmwriter, filmmaker, film producer and journalist. He was the co-director of nearly a dozen Senegalese films, including Touki Bouki with Djibril Diop Mambety, Baks with Momar Thiam, Sarah et Marjama with Axel Lohman, and the co-screenwriter of the latter...
who was also a journalist, began filming a series of short films in Senegal. His first short film was Les Princes Noirs de Saint Germain-des-Près, released in 1972, which is also his best known. It is a satire on a young and unemployed African trying to live differently in the French capital. His second film, Samba Tali, was released in early 1975.
It received the Best Short Film Prize at the Festival International du Film de l'Ensemble Francophone in Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
in 1975 and at the Carthage Festival in 1976.
1980s to present:The decline in film production
By 1980 the country was producing five full length films a year and numerous short films. Bèye would produce and direct his first feature film, Sey, Seyti, in 1980, which was a raised criticism of polygamyPolygamy
Polygamy is a marriage which includes more than two partners...
in Senegal. It was the runner up for the Best Screenplay Prize at a contest organized for the Francophone countries by the Agency for Technical and Cultural Cooperation. It received an honorable mention at the Locarno Film Festival and the Prix de la Commune Pan-African Film Festival
Pan-African Film Festival
Established in 1992, The Pan African Film Festival is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the promotion of cultural and racial tolerance and understanding through the exhibition of film, art and creative expression....
s in 1980 and 1981 respectively.
Safi Faye continued directing in the 1980s with Man Sa Yay in 1980 and Les âmes au soleil in 1981. In 1983, Faye directed the documentary film Selbé: One Among Many which 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. Selbé regularly converses with Faye, who remains off-screen, and describes her relationship with her husband and daily life in the village.
Although she continued to direct films in the 1980s, with later releases such asRacines noires and Elsie Haas, femme peintre et cinéaste d'Haiti in 1985 and Tesito in 1989, her films, often because of controverisal subject matter from a domestic viewpoint, her films were shown in Europe and rarely being shown in Senegal or Africa.
After 1983 Senegalese cinema experienced a significant decline, partly due to lack of domestic funding. Directors such as Sembene were wealthy enough to continue making films, following on with Camp de Thiaroye (1987), and Guelwaar (1992) but the country lacked the domestic resources and finance needed to develop the industry and fulfill its potential. Even today in Senegal there are many cinematographers and people who have knowledge of film production, particularly in Dakar
Dakar
Dakar is the capital city and largest city of Senegal. It is located on the Cap-Vert Peninsula on the Atlantic coast and is the westernmost city on the African mainland...
but have not the resources to develop the industry fully. Any films which have been produced since have almost entirely been financed from abroad and exhibited at international film festivals rather than in Senegal, which still has many cinemas standing from the golden era of the 1970s which by African standards are still advanced.
New Yorker Films
New Yorker Films is an independent film distribution company founded by Daniel Talbot in 1965. It started as an extension of his Manhattan movie house, the New Yorker Theater, after he discovered he was unable to obtain certain foreign titles for exhibition....
. In 2000 he directed Faat Kiné
Faat Kiné
Faat Kiné is a 2000 Senegalese film written and directed by Ousmane Sembène, set in present-day Dakar, Senegal. It provides a critical look at modern, post-colonial Senegal and the place of women in that society...
which provided an important critical insight into modern, post-colonial Senegal and the role of women in that society. The film addresses themes of pregnancy out of wedlock and adultery and also examines the contrasts between the middle and lower classes and poverty with the uneven distribution of wealth and modernity, and struggles in values between past and present in Senegal. Sembène directed his final film in 2004 with his feature, Moolaadé
Moolaadé
Moolaadé is a 2004 film by the Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène. It addresses the subject of female genital mutilation, a common practice in a number of African countries, especially those immediately south of the Sahara Desert...
. It won awards at the Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
and the FESPACO Film Festival in Ouagadougou
Ouagadougou
Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso and the administrative, communications, cultural and economic center of the nation. It is also the country's largest city, with a population of 1,475,223 . The city's name is often shortened to Ouaga. The inhabitants are called ouagalais...
, Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso – also known by its short-form name Burkina – is a landlocked country in west Africa. It is surrounded by six countries: Mali to the north, Niger to the east, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, and Côte d'Ivoire to the southwest.Its size is with an estimated...
. The film, set in a small African village in Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso – also known by its short-form name Burkina – is a landlocked country in west Africa. It is surrounded by six countries: Mali to the north, Niger to the east, Benin to the southeast, Togo and Ghana to the south, and Côte d'Ivoire to the southwest.Its size is with an estimated...
, explored the controversial subject of Female circumcision.
Valerio Truffa is another of Senegal's most noted film directors, and he is the director of film schools elsewhere in Africa in countries such as Bénin
Benin
Benin , officially the Republic of Benin, is a country in West Africa. It borders Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east and Burkina Faso and Niger to the north. Its small southern coastline on the Bight of Benin is where a majority of the population is located...
and Madagascar
Madagascar
The Republic of Madagascar is an island country located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa...
. Amadou Tidiane Niagane is the director of cinematography for the Senegal Ministry of Culture.
Notable film directors
- Ben Diogaye BeyeBen Diogaye BeyeBen Diogaye Bèye is a Senegalese filmwriter, filmmaker, film producer and journalist. He was the co-director of nearly a dozen Senegalese films, including Touki Bouki with Djibril Diop Mambety, Baks with Momar Thiam, Sarah et Marjama with Axel Lohman, and the co-screenwriter of the latter...
- Djibril Diop MambétyDjibril Diop MambétyDjibril Diop Mambéty was a Senegalese film director, actor, orator, composer and poet. Though he made only a small number of films, they received international acclaim for their original and experimental cinematic technique and non-linear, unconventional narrative style. Born to a Muslim family...
- Safi FayeSafi FayeSafi Faye is a Senegalese film director and ethnologist. She was the first Sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film. She has directed several documentary and fiction films focussing on rural life in Senegal.-Early life and education:Safi Faye was born in 1943 in...
- Ousmane SembèneOusmane SembèneOusmane Sembène , often credited in the French style as Sembène Ousmane in articles and reference works, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer...
- Khady SyllaKhady SyllaKhady Sylla is a Senegalese writer of two novels, short work, and film.-Life:She studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure where she became interested in a literary career. She later became one of a small number of African women film makers. Her An Open Window won a first film prize at the Marseille...
- Mahama Johnson TraoréMahama Johnson TraoréMahama Johnson Traoré was a Senegalese film director, writer, and co-founder of the Ouagadougou-based Pan-African Cinema Festival .-Biography:...
- Valerio Truffa
- Paulin Soumanou VieyraPaulin Soumanou VieyraPaulin Soumanou Vieyra was a Beninese/Senegalese film director and historian. As he lived in Senegal after age ten, he is more associated to that nation. In 1955 in Paris he shot the first Francophone African film, Afrique sur Seine...
- Mansour Sora WadeMansour Sora WadeMansour Sora Wade is a Senegalese film director of Lebou people ancestry. He studied at Paris 8 University and went on to direct the audiovisual archives for the Senegalese Ministry of Culture, a job he held from 1977 to 1985. He began making short films in 1983...
Notable films
- L’Afrique sur Seine (1955)
- Borom SarretBorom SarretBorom Sarret is the first film by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène over which he had full control. It is often considered the first film ever made in Africa by a black African. It is twenty minutes long and tells a story about a cart driver in Dakar...
(1963) - Niaye (1964)
- La Noire de...(1966)
- MandabiMandabiMandabi is a 1968 film directed by Ousmane Sembène. The film is based on Sembène's novel The Money-Order. It the director's first film in his native Wolof language.-Plot:...
(1968) - Contras City (1968)
- Badou BoyBadou BoyBadou Boy is a 1970 Senegalese short film, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty.The film follows the adventures of Badou Boy, a cheeky young man, as he travels through the streets of Dakar on the city buses....
(1970) - Touki BoukiTouki BoukiTouki Bouki is a 1973 Senegalese drama film, directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. It was shown at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival....
(1973) - XalaXalaXala is a 1975 Senegalese film directed by Ousmane Sembène. It is an adaptation of Sembène's own 1973 novel of the same name. The film depicts El Hadji, a politician in Senegal, who is cursed with crippling erectile dysfunction upon the day of his marriage to his third wife...
(1974) - Ceddo (1977)
- Camp de Thiaroye (1988)
- GuelwaarGuelwaarGuelwaar is a 1993 French drama film written and directed by Ousmane Sembène. The film won The President of the Italian Senate's Gold Medal at the 49th Venice International Film Festival.-Cast:* Marie Augustine Diatta...
(1992) - Faat KinéFaat KinéFaat Kiné is a 2000 Senegalese film written and directed by Ousmane Sembène, set in present-day Dakar, Senegal. It provides a critical look at modern, post-colonial Senegal and the place of women in that society...
(2000) - MoolaadéMoolaadéMoolaadé is a 2004 film by the Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène. It addresses the subject of female genital mutilation, a common practice in a number of African countries, especially those immediately south of the Sahara Desert...
(2004)