The Festival des 3 Continents is delighted to unveil the poster for its 45th edition, which will be held in Nantes, France, from November 24th to December 3rd 2023.
The poster, designed by Lesbeauxjours graphics agency, features a portrait of the Senegalese director Safi Faye, to whom the festival is paying tribute with a retrospective of her work.
“She was a pioneer in filmmaking and the first woman from sub-Saharan Africa to make a feature film (Lettre paysanne, 1975 – Georges Sadoul Prize and Berlin Critics’ Prize). Safi Faye passed away last February just as we were about to invite her this November to present all her work at the Festival des 3 Continents, says Jérôme Baron, the festival’s artistic director.
A tribute now replaces this invitation, to which the filmmaker seems to respond with a wave of her hand, a smile rising in her eyes, from an editing room where she used to work.”
Safi FAYE, ©All rights reserved, lbj 2023.
“I made films so that my mother, who didn’t go to school, could read my images. […]
I chose the rural world because I’m a farmer. I wanted to focus on this world, which is the only one that can save Africa”
Safi Faye
From her beginnings working as an actress with Jean Rouch to the singularity of a body of work with a strong documentary imprint, Safi Faye has seized the tools of cinema not only as those of a possible feminine, social and colonial emancipation, but also to give back to an oral, gestural and earthy tradition its strength and its history. An African woman, a peasant loyal to her native Sérère, a committed filmmaker and a free woman, Safi Faye was not so only a multi-faceted personality but also the full and complete embodiment of an African identity facing up to the challenges of her time.
The Festival des 3 Continents highlights will be announced shortly, and the Official Selection will be revealed at a press conference in Nantes, France, on 9 November 2023.
