Safi Faye

Safi Faye was born on the twenty-second of November 1943 at Dakar, French West Africa, the daughter of a Serer father of the village of Fad'jal in the Sine-Saloum region and a Wolof-Serer mother of suburban Dakar. She was raised at Dakar and at the family village of Fad'jal.

She completed the École normale des jeunes filles de Rufisque in 1963 — the principal teacher-training institute of post-independence Senegal — and taught at the École Vincent Lasanté at Dakar from 1963 to 1972.

She was selected by Jean Rouch in 1966 as the Senegalese co-lead of the Rouch ethnographic feature Petit à Petit — at the Festival mondial des arts nègres of Dakar of April 1966 — and travelled with the Rouch film company to Paris.

She enrolled at the Lumière Institute of Cinematography at Paris in 1972 and the École pratique des hautes études at Paris under the ethnographer Jean Rouch from 1972 to 1979. She completed the doctorate in ethnology at the École pratique des hautes études in 1979.

She directed her first short film, La Passante, in 1972 — a short study of an African woman walking in Paris — and her first feature, Lettre paysanne (Kaddu Beykat), in 1975. Kaddu Beykat was the first feature film by a sub-Saharan African woman director to receive commercial distribution. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival of February 1976 and the Georges Sadoul Prize at the Critics' Week at Cannes in 1976.

She directed Fad'jal in 1979 — a one-hundred-and-eight-minute ethnographic study of her ancestral Serer village in the Sine-Saloum — selected for the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in May 1979.

She directed Mossane in 1996 — a ninety-minute drama of a Serer village girl's resistance to an arranged marriage — selected for the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May 1996, after a sixteen-year hiatus from feature direction caused by legal battles with the German producers over the production of Mossane.

She was the principal ethnographic documentarian of rural Senegalese life across the 1970s through the 2000s — and produced approximately fifteen ethnographic documentaries for German, French, and Senegalese television across her career.

She died at Paris on the twenty-second of February 2023 of natural causes, at seventy-nine.

She is honored here as the director of Lettre paysanne and Mossane.