Excerpted from interview in the chapter “Africa Through a Woman's Eyes: Safi Faye's Cinema” in Focus on African Films, editor, Françoise Pfaff, Indiana University Press, 2004.
Interview held at Fespaco, February 1997, Ouagadougou Burkina Faso for the African women in the cinema project. Translated from French.
What was it like during the time when you began in the 1970’s?
I did not come to the cinema by chance. I studied ethnology at the Sorbonne. We were able to have cinematography equipment once a week, and to learn how to used it. I realized that in order to be more efficient I should go to film school…I learned like everyone else--I was the only African woman--how to handle a camera and I became familiar with how to use the cinematography equipment.
At the end of the first year, I dared to make a little film [La Passante]…That is how I came to learn filmmaking, it was very easy during those years. I made the film in 1972. Right away, everybody began to talk; "there is an African woman who is making films." It was easy for everybody to know about me because I was the first to appear on the scene. It was by chance and by choice that I arrived at making this little film. A little film, rather intimist that I made for myself.
…Could you talk about the themes of Mossane and its evolution? What inspired you towards the idea of Mossane?
All my other films have been half-fiction, half-documentary. As I was working with the rural population, it was not possible to arrange the community and its people to fit within the storyline of my film. It was only in Mossane that I was able to adapt the community and the people to the story that I had imagined.
I don't know how a film is born. It's an idea that comes; I then begin to work on it…while cooking, while getting dressed, while bathing, everywhere I went. In the meantime, I made little films that were commissioned, which allowed me to live. I don't know how Mossane was born. All that I know is that I have a daughter, my only child, who I cherish. And perhaps through these feelings I wanted to cherish Mossane, and to make her the most beautiful, the purest, and most virtuous.
...Is it a mythology of your daughter or a metaphor for women, for Senegal, for the Serer…?
In the film, Mossane is thirteen and a half years old. When one has a fourteen-year-old daughter, her changes are visible; each photo is different from the other, yet the girl is always the same. There are transformations that a mother perceives of her daughter at that age. It is this that I wanted to sculpt. I wanted to recreate a beauty that only exists at this age…
This film that I have made, is for me, a song to women. The things that I find so beautiful, the things that I have lived that I have experienced or that I have been told. And then, I made these images according to my vision.
Do you think that Mossane is in some ways a climactic point of your work during these pass twenty-five years?
…Mossane is the result of a lot of long work, but it was work that I did with much joy. I began to write the first sentence in 1982. I had Mossane in my head as I cooked… while I helped my daughter with her schoolwork. Mossane was always with me. One must hold the ideas of one's film as such, I think. One must possess one's film in this way in order to achieve the results that I have now...
