Souleymane Cissé

See also: Cissé

Souleymane Cissé is a scenario writer Mali into born the April 21st 1940 with Bamako (Mali).

Biography

Souleymane Cissé was born in a modest Moslem family. It is impassioned of cinema as of its childhood. Since the 7 years age, he very regularly attends the cinema like spectator in company of his big brothers and their friends. He makes secondary studies with Dakar and returns to Mali in 1960 at the time of the bursting of the Federation of Mali and independence of his country. He adheres then to youth movements and starts to project at the House of the Young people of Bamako of the films which he then comments on with the public. It is a Documentary film on the arrest of Patrice Lumumba which starts really its will to make cinema. It obtains a purse to follow a training course of projectionist then studies of cinema to the Institute of the High Higher learning of the Cinematography of Moscow. It leaves there graduate in 1969. In 1970, sunken to Mali, it is employed like cameraman-deferring to the Cinématoraphique Service of the Ministry for Information, which offers the occasion to him to traverse Mali length in broad camera with the shoulder during three years and to carry out several documentary.

Souleymane Cissé turns its first medium-length film Five days of a life in 1971. The film reports the history of a young person who gives up the Koranic school and vagrant in the streets, living menus larcenies. Work is preceded with the Festival of Carthage. In 1975, it carries out its first film in Bambara Den Muso ( the Young girl ) in connection with a dumb young girl violated by an unemployed. Enclosure, it undergoes the rejection of its family and the father of the child who refuses to recognize it. The film is prohibited by the minister Malian of the culture and Souleymane Cissé is arrested and imprisoned to have accepted the French co-operation. The scathing attack will remain prohibited during three years and will obtain its visa of exploitation only in 1978.

Civil servant of the State, Souleymane Cissé takes an availability in 1977 in order to devote himself fully to the cinema and creates the production company the Films Cissé (Sisé Filimu). In 1978, leaves the film Baara ( Work ) which receives the Standard of Yennenga to the FESPACO (Panafrican Festival of the cinema and the television of Ouagadougou) the same year. Succeed Finyè ( the Wind , 1982). It is about a chronicle on the revolt of the students Malians vis-a-vis it military capacity. At its exit, the film multiplies the rewards: Standard of Yennenga to Fespaco de Ouagadougou in 1983, Tanit d' Or with the Festival of Carthage. The film is also selected with the Cannes festival 1982; the scenario writer will be member of his jury the following year.

Between 1984 and 1987, it turns Yeelen ( the Light ), initiatory film on the painful ways which the child takes to become adult. It obtains the Special price of the Jury to the Cannes festival in 1987. Souleymane Cissé turns Waati ( Time , 1995), which recalls the history of Nandi, a black child of South Africa at the time of the Apartheid, which flees its country to leave in Ivory Coast, in Mali and in Namibia, before returning in its country of origin after the end of the mode.

Souleymane Cissé is, since 1997, president of the Union of the creators and contractors of the cinema and audio-visual of West Africa (UCECAO). Souleymane Cissé was raised by the president of the Republic, Amadou Toumani Touré, with the row of Commander of the National order of Mali the 1st January 2006. It is also high with the rank of Commander of Arts and Lettres of the French Republic.

Selective catalog of films

Rewards

  • 2007 : prize winner of the Price Henri-Langlois of Vincennes

Quotations

  • “the first task of the African scenario writers is to affirm that people from here are human beings, and to make known those of our values which could be used for the others. The generation which will follow us will open on other aspects of the cinema. Our duty with us is to render comprehensible that the white lied by their images. ”

  • “My way of living, it is to believe in the future; if I were fatalistic, I would not be scenario writer. Nothing pushed to me to make cinema. It is me which chose it. I wanted to see the things and to show them. When one has this curiosity, one cannot be fatalistic”.

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