Souleymane Cissé, an award-winning author and director who turned the primary Black African filmmaker to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Movie Pageant, died on Wednesday in Bamako, Mali. He was 84.
His dying was confirmed by François Margolin, a French movie producer and a detailed good friend 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 Pageant of Ouagadougou, often called 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 the perfect 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 tip 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 good friend about six months in the past.
Mr. Cissé directed his first feature-length film, “Den Muso,” (“The Younger Lady”) in 1975. The film, in Bambara, is a few 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 Worldwide Pageant of Movie Preservation. The Malian authorities censored the movie, and Mr. Cissé was briefly imprisoned on what MoMA described as “trumped-up fees.”
Nevertheless it was “Yeelen,” Mr. Cissé’s fourth function, that cemented his place as a prime filmmaker. The film is a few younger man with magical powers who travels to his uncle with the request to battle 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 Occasions wrote in 1987.
Mr. Scorsese has mentioned the movie helped encourage him to start out the World Cinema Venture, 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, based on the Cannes Movie Pageant.
Mr. Cissé’s survivors embody 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 law enforcement officials forcibly eliminated Mr. Cissé’s 4 sisters from their childhood residence 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 turned the second African filmmaker to win that prize after Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese director, who received the prize at the 2005 competition.
“If the occupation acknowledges the movies you have got made,” Mr. Cissé informed a French radio broadcaster in 2023. “I feel it’s an distinctive reward.”
In that interview, he additionally expressed optimism for the way forward for African filmmaking, saying that he didn’t suppose it might 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 US,” he mentioned. “Africa is transported by pictures.”
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