Sub-Saharan director Safi Faye’s groundbreaking ‘Mossane’ makes its West Coast premiere
By Ryan Aliapoulios
Though the internet and digital outlets like Netflix have made it easier to watch all kinds of films right at home, the distribution of movies and shows we see are often limited by where we are in the world. As a result, we may be getting a narrower view of world cinema than we realize. For anyone who attended the LA premiere screening of ‘Mossane’ at the first annual Female Filmmakers Festival this past weekend, that reality couldn’t have been made clearer.
‘Mossane’ is a feature film directed by Safi Faye, a Senegalese director and ethnologist who was the first female filmmaker from Sub-Saharan Africa to make an internationally distributed feature, namely ‘Kaddu Beykat,’ released in 1976. Though ‘Mossane’ screened at the Cannes Film Festival and won the prestigious Un Certain Regard award in 1996, the process of getting it released took six long years. As it turns out, only one 35mm print of the film with English subtitles existed in an American museum. It was eventually pulled out and digitized for Africa in Motion festival in 2017 with Faye’s permission.