Souleymane Cissé
*Souleymane Cissé was born on this date in 1940. He was a Black African film director.
Born in Bamako, Mali, Souleymane Cissé was a passionate cinephile from childhood. He attended secondary school in Dakar and returned to Mali in 1960 after national independence.
His film career began as an assistant projectionist for a documentary on the arrest of Patrice Lumumba. He obtained a scholarship at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, the Moscow School of Cinema and Television. In 1970, he returned to Mali and joined the Ministry of Information as a cameraman. Two years later, he produced his first medium-length film, Cinq jours d'une vie (Five Days in a Life), which premiered at the Carthage Film Festival.
In 1974, Cissé produced his first full-length film in the Bambara language, Den Muso (The Girl), the story of a young mute girl who has been raped. Cissé would finish and release this film to much acclaim four years later, winning the Yenenga's Talon prize at Fespaco in 1979. In 1982, Cissé produced Finyé (Wind). This earned him his second Yenenga's Talon in 1983. Between 1984 and 1987, he produced Yeelen (Light or Brightness), the first African film to win a prize at the Cannes Film Festival 1987. In 1995, he produced Waati (Time), which competed at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. In 2009, he filmed a comedy that talks about polygamy, inspired by his father, when he, his eight brothers, and his sister left their house in 1988.
In the film O Ka (Our House), he reminded the legal battle of his sisters when they were expelled from their house in Bamako. He was president of UCECAO, the Union of Creators and Entrepreneurs of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts of Western Africa. His younger brother is film director Alioune Ifra Ndiaye. Cissé was awarded the 'Carrosse d'Or' award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, a symbol of the pioneering quality of his films. Cissé was one of the most recognized African filmmakers of the twentieth century, and his work exemplifies the development of social realism in African cinema, including its eventual movement towards the recovery of tradition. Cissé is "a master of complex storytelling, preserving the mysterious in the mundane."
His films have been known for their uncompromising depictions of military violence, abuse of money and power, trade unionism, and the enduring stranglehold of patriarchal traditions over Bamako's women and youth. Souleymane Cissé died in Bamako, Mali, on February 19, 2025, at 84. Shortly before his death, he was scheduled to chair the "fiction feature film" jury at the 29th edition of Fespaco in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
