🇸🇳 🎥Our series on artists from the continent continues with Safi Faye, the “first African woman to dare to make a film." She was born in 1943 and grew up in Fad’jal, a village south of Dakar. Faye taught for 6 years before embarking in filmmaking. She studied ethnology at the Sorbonne and filmmaking at Louis Lumièere Film school. Her films blur the line between documentary and fiction and focus on rural life in Senegal. Many of her works emphasize oral history and oral storytelling, with women’s voices at the center of it. While her films center African women, she emphasizes that her works do more than that, saying “Women alone cannot live in Africa. Women live in a community, and I cannot eliminate the community.” By choosing to document her own family and community, she challenges the colonial practice of ethnography and the practice of documenting an exotic “Other”. “Through my research I was able to understand the struggles and concerns of the people of the region from where I come, the peasantry, which are my roots.” Thank you Safi Faye, mother of African cinema, for your contributions! First 3 slides are stills from her feature film, Mossane. Slide 4 is a still from her short film Kaddu Beykat (Letterfrom My Village). And the last two slides are portraits of the filmmaker at work.