Souleymane Cissé, an award-winning writer and director who became the first Black African filmmaker to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Bamako, Mali. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by François Margolin, a French film producer and a close friend of Mr. Cissé’s for the last three decades.
Mr. Cissé had just appeared at a news conference on Wednesday morning to present two prizes ahead of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, known as Fespaco, where he had been set to head the jury.
After the news conference — where he was “talking and joking” — Mr. Cissé went to take a nap and didn’t wake up, Mr. Margolin said.
Mr. Cissé was catapulted to worldwide fame with the release in 1987 of “Yeelen” (“Light” in his native Bambara). The film won the jury prize at Cannes and was nominated as the best foreign film in the 1989 Spirit Awards. The director Martin Scorsese called the film “one of the great revelatory experiences of my moviegoing life.”
Mr. Cissé had been energetic until the end of his life, Mr. Margolin said, working and traveling around the world.
“He was never an old man,” said Mr. Margolin, who said he last saw his friend about six months ago.
Mr. Cissé directed his first feature-length movie, “Den Muso,” (“The Young Girl”) in 1975. The movie, in Bambara, is about a mute girl who becomes pregnant after being raped and is subsequently shunned by her family.
Mr. Cissé “pulled no punches with his debut feature,” the Museum of Modern Art said in 2022, when it hosted a viewing of the film as part of its annual International Festival of Film Preservation. The Malian authorities censored the film, and Mr. Cissé was briefly imprisoned on what MoMA described as “trumped-up charges.”
But it was “Yeelen,” Mr. Cissé’s fourth feature, that cemented his position as a top filmmaker. The movie is about a young man with magical powers who travels to his uncle with the request to fight his sorcerer father. It “recreates the pre-modern world of the Bambara culture, where the only hint of the industrial age is the presence of a blacksmith,” The Times wrote in 1987.
Mr. Scorsese has said the film helped inspire him to start the World Cinema Project, a nonprofit that restores neglected films around the world.
“Souleymane’s work has had a deep and lasting effect on me,” Mr. Scorsese wrote in 2023.
Souleymane Cissé was born on April 21, 1940, in Bamako, Mali’s capital. He spent his high school years in Dakar, Senegal, before going to the Russian State University of Cinematography in Moscow on a scholarship, according to the Cannes Film Festival.
Mr. Cissé’s survivors include his daughters Fatou, a filmmaker who worked closely with her father, and Mariam.
Mr. Cissé’s most recent credit was the 2015 film “O Ka” (“Our House”), his fifth to debut at Cannes. The movie tells the story of how police officers forcibly removed Mr. Cissé’s four sisters from their childhood home in 2008.
In 2023, Cannes honored Mr. Cissé again, this time with the Carrosse d’Or — the Golden Coach Award — a prize given by the Society of French Directors. Mr. Cissé became the second African filmmaker to win that prize after Ousmane Sembène, a Senegalese director, who won the prize at the 2005 festival.
“If the profession recognizes the films you have made,” Mr. Cissé told a French radio broadcaster in 2023. “I think it’s an exceptional reward.”
In that interview, he also expressed optimism for the future of African filmmaking, saying that he did not think it would take 15 more years for another director from the continent to win the Golden Coach Award.
He also emphasized the importance of African filmmaking. “Africa cannot be transported to France or Europe or the United States,” he said. “Africa is transported through images.”
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