Letter from My Village

The ongoing drought in a Senegalese village has decimated millet and peanut farmers’ yields. The catastrophic damage brought about by the colonial era’s agricultural monoculture is becoming ever more palpable; farm labourer Ngor is now unable to afford the dowry for his lover Coumba and thus sets off to Dakar to try his luck with odd jobs. Filmmaker Safi Faye – who studied ethnology – frames the action with her own comments, thus creating an audiovisual letter about her home village. Shot in three weeks with a small team, this docufiction is the remarkable product of her participatory collaboration with the villagers – among them her grandfather, who died shortly after filming wrapped. Safi Faye was the first sub-Saharan woman director whose films received commercial distribution. Her powerful oeuvre has thus far received all too little scholarly attention, even while receiving acclaim for how it looks at the experience of women and children in rural areas. The film will be shown as a tribute to Faye to mark the first anniversary of her death, accompanied by a talk where she will be remembered in conversation with guests.