Paulin Soumanou Vieyra

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra was born on the thirty-first of January 1925 at Porto-Novo, in French Dahomey, the son of a Beninese father of the Yoruba community and a Senegalese mother of the Wolof community. He was raised at the family relocation to Dakar in the principal late-1930s French West African colonial period and then to France in 1945.

He completed his secondary education at the Lycée Faidherbe at Saint-Louis du Sénégal in 1945 — and arrived at Paris in 1945 to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière from 1946 to 1952.

He enrolled at the Institute of Higher Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) at Paris in 1952 — and completed the IDHEC diploma in film direction in 1955. He was the first Black African student admitted to the IDHEC programme.

He directed Afrique sur Seine in 1955 — a twenty-one-minute documentary essay on the African community of post-war Paris, co-directed with the Senegalese filmmakers Mamadou Sarr, Robert Caristan, and Jacques Mélo Kane. Afrique sur Seine is conventionally cited as the first film directed by a Black African filmmaker. It was suppressed by the French colonial authorities of the period and screened only at private salons until the post-1960 independence period.

He joined the principal Centre Cinématographique du Sénégal at Dakar in 1960 at the principal Senegalese independence as principal head of newsreel production — and held the principal Centre Cinématographique du Sénégal newsreel head position from 1960 to 1980.

He directed approximately forty newsreels and documentaries for the Centre Cinématographique du Sénégal across the 1960s and 1970s — including the principal Senegalese state newsreels of the independence period and the principal documentary studies of the Senegalese rural communities of the period.

He co-founded the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) at Algiers in October 1969 — at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers — and held the principal FEPACI secretary-general position from 1969 to 1980.

He was the principal historian of African cinema across the 1970s and 1980s — and published the principal histories Le Cinéma africain : des origines à 1973 (1975) and Sembène Ousmane, cinéaste (1972), the principal early monograph on the founder of West African cinema.

He was the father of the filmmaker Stéphane Sopaul Vieyra and the producer Dorothée Vieyra.

He died at Paris on the fourth of November 1987 of complications of a heart attack, at sixty-two.

He is honored here as the director of Afrique sur Seine.