Senegalese director Safi Faye died on Sunday February 26 in Paris, at the age of 80. First a teacher, she then turned to cinema after meeting Jean Rouch in Dakar in 1966 during the World Festival of Negro Arts. After studying ethnology at the EHESS and the Louis-Lumière school, she had become one of the first filmmakers on the African continent, mainly of documentaries with Kaddu Beykat (Lettre paysanne, 1975), Goob Na Nu (The harvest is over, 1979) or Les Ames au soleil (1981).
One of her last films, Mossane – her only work of fiction – had been presented in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996. She was also guest of honor at the CNC in Cannes in 2018, on the occasion of the presentation of the restoration of her film Fad'jal (named after her native village, 1979), in the Cannes Classics section.