On February 19th local time, Mariam Cisse, the daughter of the famous Malian director Souleymane Cisse, published a message announcing his death: "Dad passed away today in Bamako. The sad news has made us still unable to calm down. He dedicated his whole life to his motherland, to film and art." This outstanding filmmaker, who was born in an African region where the film industry is not well developed, ended his ill-fated life in a clinic in the capital of his motherland.
Souleymane Cissé
Souleymane Cissé was born into a Muslim family in Bamako on April 21, 1940. He loved movies since he was a child. In the 1960s, he graduated from the famous Soviet State Academy of Cinematography (the world's earliest specialized film school, renamed the Russian State Gerasimov Academy of Cinematography after 1991), and returned to his country in 1970 to join the Malian Ministry of Information Industry as a documentary photographer.
In 1974, at the age of 34, Cissé completed his first feature film, The Girl. However, the plot of the film, in which a deaf-mute girl was raped and then displaced, was deemed unacceptable by the Malian Ministry of Culture. Cissé was implicated and arrested and imprisoned on the grounds of accepting suspicious overseas filming funds.
Stills from Girl
Stills from Work
While in prison, Cissé completed the script for his second work, "The Work", and successfully filmed it after his release. In 1979, he also won the gold medal at the Pan-African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, the largest film festival in Africa. After that, he continued to work hard and devoted himself to the creation of the film "Wings of Light". This is recognized as Cissé's most mature work, and it took three years to shoot and produce. At the 40th Cannes Film Festival held in 1987, "Wings of Light" tied with "Shinran" directed by Rentaro Mikuni for the Jury Prize representing the third place in the main competition unit, and became the first African film to win an award in the history of Cannes.
Stills from Wings of Light
The background of "Wings of Light" is set in the Mali Empire in the 13th century. It tells a fantasy story about a young man who flees to avoid his father who is hunting him all the way. The film contains a lot of legends and primitive religious elements from the indigenous tribes of Mali. According to the director himself, the reason for making such a film is to respond to the anthropological documentaries shot by European filmmakers in Africa. In the mid-20th century, European filmmakers represented by French documentary director Jean Rouch shot a lot of documentaries in Africa that recorded local cultural traditions and customs, which opened the eyes of Western audiences. But in the eyes of Cisse, who is a native of his hometown, such works named "real movies" are actually projections of the curious perspectives of colonists, and there is no truth at all; the stories of Africans can only be told clearly by African filmmakers themselves.
Unfortunately, the success of Wings of Light only brought Cisse the reputation of being the "Father of African Cinema". Being in the economically underdeveloped country of Mali, Cisse could only rely on European funding for filming, but his works were deeply rooted in the soil of Africa and it was difficult for them to gain much mainstream audience in the West. The lack of funds, manpower and material resources meant that Cisse did not produce many influential new works after Wings of Light.
At the opening ceremony of the Directors' Fortnight, a parallel section of the 55th Cannes Film Festival in 2023, the French Directors' Society (SRF) specially awarded him a Golden Carriage Award in recognition of his entire directing career. Unexpectedly, just one year later, on April 29, 2024, the trophy was stolen from his home in Bamako. At the time, the incident caused an uproar in Mali, and senior government officials promised to mobilize the whole country to find the thief, but in the end, there was still no trace of the thief.
On the day the news of Souleymane Cissé's death was announced, Mali's Minister of Culture Mamou Daffe issued a statement expressing "incredible sorrow" over the death of "this milestone figure in African cinema" and praising him as an "admirable and respected filmmaker."
In fact, Cisse's death came very suddenly. Originally, he was going to serve as the chairman of the jury of the main competition unit of the 29th Ouagadougou Pan-African Film Festival, which was to open on March 1. On the morning of his death, Cisse also held a press conference in Bamako. "I hope the Malian government can also help us to get more Malian domestic films into theaters. They must see that movies have made Nigeria and Ghana shine, and the same is possible in Mali," he said sincerely at the press conference. "We also have a large number of young filmmakers in Mali who are fully capable of making good movies. However, it is not enough to just make a movie, the work must be seen by more people. So I implore the Malian authorities to help us build more cinemas, and this is also the last appeal I, an old man, make to them before I die."
As the saying goes, a word comes true. Later that day, he was hospitalized due to an acute illness and passed away. I just don't know if his final request was heard by the Malian cultural department. The Republic of Mali, located in the inland area of western Africa, was established nearly 65 years ago and is still one of the poorest countries in Africa. Even in the capital Bamako, there are only two theaters operating normally, and most of the films shown are imported films.
