From one festival to another over the years, here or elsewhere, we see the filmmaker Souleymane Cissé appear in his magnificent boubous. He is a great ambassador for Mali through his costumes, his films, his love for his country, his dream of seeing it grow and prosper. “The country needs the man who is coming to save us and he hasn’t come yet. The change will be radical, predicts me in an interview who defines himself as an eternal optimist. We need to assert ourselves. His courtesy honors him. Her sphynx eyes exude a softness mixed with will.
Thursday evening, Vues d’Afrique projected at the opening of its Montreal meeting A daughter’s tribute to her father, by Fatou Cisse. The film recounts the life and career of Souleymane Cissé, who bewitched us with Finye (the wind), Yeelen (the light), and so many other works bearing memory and beauty. He also received a special prize for his entire body of work. Next month, at Cannes, the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs will award him his Carrosse d’or. Hopefully he won’t turn into a pumpkin when he gets home. Because on the international scene, his name shines. Martin Scorsese, to whom he dedicates the documentary Scorsese in Bamako, always supported and admired him. The French filmmaker Costa-Gavras also. Both testify in his daughter’s film to their deep esteem for him, like other beacons of the seventh art.
Alas! At home, he struggles to turn, and we don’t do too many bows to him. The one who has offered Mali for fifty years the images of his political career, of the daily life, of the revolts and of the roots of the people, is not a prophet in his country. Many authoritarian regimes have succeeded in the former French colony. Last Tuesday, an official delegation, including the chief of staff of the transitional government, who was assassinated, was the target of a deadly jihadist ambush, in a climate of deep instability.
Why this lack of Malian love for a prodigal son? Is it for having unvarnished the injustices that set his society ablaze? He and his daughter tell me that they do not know the reasons for this rejection. “I made my documentary to answer this question, without succeeding,” replies Fatou Cissé. I saw my father’s difficulties in advancing his projects and events. I also wanted people to know Souleymane’s personality, his simplicity. His father’s films evoke the demons of the country: polygamy, deep misogyny, injustices and corruption. The struggles of students and workers are perpetuated on his films. “Souleymane listens to people, talks to them, explains Fatou. Its actors are mostly non-professionals. He comes from the same soil as them, gives them confidence. So they are natural in their game.” A daughter’s tribute to her father was released last year, but did not, to the chagrin of the documentary filmmaker, find its way to international television: “Festivals are aimed at a limited clientele. I would like my documentary to be exported elsewhere on the small screen. »
Souleymane Cissé had tried prison after his Den Muso (1975), on a raped and abandoned young mute, a metaphor for feminine silences, co-financed with France. The film was banned by the political authorities. For the financing of its works, the fight remains constant, because the structures of assistance to the cinema miss and the situation worsens. No money and little interest in the seventh art in high places. “Our existence depends on the culture to be preserved,” he said, specifying that he bet on education, which has so many failures in the country. “My country swallows up a lot of stories that the Islamists have tried to erase. » How to forget his extraordinary Yeelen (1987), which shows Bambara shamanic rituals on bewitchment images? The filmmaker is a memoirist.
His daughter Fatou, who became his production manager, also got involved with the organizations set up by her father to unite the filmmakers of black Africa and to help young people in learning cinema. “But for a few years, everything stopped. “The only way to film here is to be a videographer,” sighs Souleymane Cissé. His works have been co-produced in France, Burkina Faso and elsewhere, but it is at home that the shoe pinches.
I saw my father’s difficulties in advancing his projects and events. I also wanted people to know Souleymane’s personality, his simplicity.
The filmmaker reminds me of his childhood, spent in Bamako in a poor family, with a mother who carried him on her back. He discusses his early love for art and for the cinema, where his brothers trained him. As a child, he created the silhouettes of his shadow theater with cardboard before playing on the boards. His scholarship obtained to study cinema in Moscow opened the doors of his profession to him and taught him to manage. But back in Mali, he also helped his mother, who had become paralyzed, tried many jobs, including that of reporter-cameraman for the Ministry of Information, before founding his own production company. The cinema enlightened his life. The sight of a documentary on the arrest of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese Prime Minister whom he admired, had once sealed his vocation. It was necessary to show, to testify. This passion still lives in him. “I want my country to come out of the shadows,” he sends to the wind like the greatest of wishes.