Souleymane Cissé, an award-winning author and director who grew to become the primary Black African filmmaker to win the Jury Prize on the Cannes Movie Competition, died on Wednesday in Bamako, Mali. He was 84.
His dying was confirmed by François Margolin, a French movie producer and a detailed pal of Mr. Cissé’s.
Mr. Cissé had simply appeared at a information convention on Wednesday morning to current two prizes forward of the Pan-African Movie and Tv Competition of Ouagadougou, often known as Fespaco, the place he had been set to move the jury.
After the information convention — the place he was “speaking and joking” — Mr. Cissé went to take a nap and didn’t get up, Mr. Margolin mentioned.
Mr. Cissé was catapulted to worldwide fame with the discharge in 1987 of “Yeelen” (“Gentle” in his native Bambara). The movie received the jury prize at Cannes and was nominated as one of the best international movie within the 1989 Spirit Awards. The director Martin Scorsese referred to as the movie “one of many nice revelatory experiences of my moviegoing life.”
Mr. Cissé had been energetic till the top of his life, Mr. Margolin mentioned, working and touring around the globe.
“He was by no means an previous man,” mentioned Mr. Margolin, who mentioned he final noticed his pal about six months in the past.
Mr. Cissé directed his first feature-length film, “Den Muso,” (“The Younger Woman”) in 1975. The film, in Bambara, is a couple of mute woman who turns into pregnant after being raped and is subsequently shunned by her household.
Mr. Cissé “pulled no punches together with his debut function,” the Museum of Trendy Artwork mentioned in 2022, when it hosted a viewing of the movie as a part of its annual International Festival of Film Preservation. The Malian authorities censored the movie, and Mr. Cissé was briefly imprisoned on what MoMA described as “trumped-up fees.”
However it was “Yeelen,” Mr. Cissé’s fourth function, that cemented his place as a high filmmaker. The film is a couple of younger man with magical powers who travels to his uncle with the request to struggle his sorcerer father. It “recreates the pre-modern world of the Bambara tradition, the place the one trace of the commercial age is the presence of a blacksmith,” The Times wrote in 1987.
Mr. Scorsese has mentioned the movie helped encourage him to start out the World Cinema Project, a nonprofit that restores uncared for movies around the globe.
“Souleymane’s work has had a deep and lasting impact on me,” Mr. Scorsese wrote in 2023.
Souleymane Cissé was born on April 21, 1940, in Bamako, Mali’s capital. He spent his highschool years in Dakar, Senegal, earlier than going to the Russian State College of Cinematography in Moscow on a scholarship, in accordance with the Cannes Movie Competition.
Mr. Cissé’s survivors embrace his daughters Fatou, a filmmaker who labored intently together with her father, and Mariam.
Mr. Cissé’s most up-to-date credit score was the 2015 movie “O Ka” (“Our Home”), his fifth to debut at Cannes. The film tells the story of how cops forcibly eliminated Mr. Cissé’s 4 sisters from their childhood dwelling in 2008.
In 2023, Cannes honored Mr. Cissé once more, this time with the Carrosse d’Or — the Golden Coach Award — a prize given by the Society of French Administrators. Mr. Cissé grew to become the second African filmmaker to win that prize after Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese director, who received the prize on the 2005 pageant.
“If the occupation acknowledges the movies you could have made,” Mr. Cissé told a French radio broadcaster in 2023. “I believe it’s an distinctive reward.”
In that interview, he additionally expressed optimism for the way forward for African filmmaking, saying that he didn’t assume it will take 15 extra years for an additional director from the continent to win the Golden Coach Award.
He additionally emphasised the significance of African filmmaking. “Africa can’t be transported to France or Europe or the USA,” he mentioned. “Africa is transported by means of pictures.”
