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| Zobacz też: |
| Safi Faye | |
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| Born | November 22, 1943 Dakar, Senegal |
| Occupation | Film director, ethnologist |
| Years active | 1972–present |
Safi Faye (b. November 22, 1943) is a Senegalese film director and ethnologist.[1] 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.
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Safi Faye was born in 1943 in Dakar, Senegal to a Serer family.[1] Her parents 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.[3][2]
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 1979–1980, 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, which she also acted in, 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.[8][5] 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 as a result of them rarely being shown in Africa.[6]
Faye is divorced and has one daughter.[3] She lives in Paris.[3]