Celebrated Malian director Souleymane Cissé, who was the first sub-Saharan African director to win a major award at Cannes with 1987 Jury Prize winner Yeelen (Brightness), has died at the age of 84.
Active right up until his death, Cissé had recently attended a press conference to present two trophies a a pre-event for the 29th edition of Fespaco, the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou.
“Papa died today in Bamako. We are all in shock. He dedicated all his life to his country, to cinema and to art,” his daughter Mariam Cissé said in a statement.
Cissé was due to preside over the jury of the biannual Fespaco festival, which opens in the capital of Burkina Faso from this Saturday.
Born in Malian capital of Bamako in 1940, Cissé was passionate about cinema from a young age.
After high school studies in neighboring Senegal, he lived briefly in post-independence Mali before heading to Russia to study film at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow on a scholarship. He returned to Mali in 1970.
After a series of documentaries and shorts, he broke into fiction with medium-length film Five Days In A Life (1973), about a young boy who drops out of a Koranic school, without any skills and turns to petty thievery to survive, to then land in jail.
He followed this with feature-length debut The Girl, the story of mute girl who becomes pregnant after she is raped and is then rejected by her family and the child’s father.
The work was banned by the Malian Ministry of Culture and Cissé was arrested and jailed on trumped up charges of accepting French funding.
He used this period of captivity to write the screenplay for feature film Work, which won Fespaco’ s top Yenenga’s Talon prize in 1979, and also played in Locarno.
His 1987 film Yeelen, about a young man with magical powers seeks out his uncle to help him in fighting his sorcerer father, truly put Cissé on the map outside of Africa when it won the Cannes Jury Prize.
He had previously played in Certain Regard with The Wind in 1982, and would also compete a second time in Cannes with South Africa Apartheid era-set drama Waati in 1995.
His later films Tell Me Who You Are and Our House, about his sisters’ eviction from their beloved childhood Bamako family home, played as Special Screenings at the festival in 2009 and 2015.C
Cissé returned to Cannes for a final time in 2023 to receive the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight Carrosse d’Or (Golden Carriage) award, celebrating filmmakers whose work has pushed cinematic boundaries, following in the wake of John Carpenter, Martin Scorsese, Jia Zhangke, Jane Campion, Agnès Varda, Naomi Kawase and Jim Jarmusch.
