[LETTER FROM MY VILLAGE]
SN 1975, R: Safi Faye, 90 Min, OmU Ngor zieht nach Dakar, weil er im Dorf keine Arbeit findet, kehrt aber enttäuscht wieder aufs Land zurück.
Die Doku-Fiction befasst sich mit den Schäden der noch aus der Kolonialzeit herrührenden landwirtschaftlichen Monokultur im Senegal.
Safi Faye, erste international bekannte Regisseurin Afrikas, wählt eine ungewöhnliche poetische Umsetzung: Ein im Voice-over vorgelesener Brief wird mit quasi-dokumentarischen Schwarz-Weiß-Bildern des Dorfes unterlegt.
KADDU BEYKAT entstand in nur drei Wochen gemeinsam mit den Dorfbewohnern, und wurde nach seiner Fertigstellung im Senegal verboten.
Director Safi Faye: „I’ve always believed that every African comes from the rural world and that is why all my research and writings have been about rural life. A film like Letter from my Village (Kaddu Beykat) is being shown again now, during the COP 21 United Nations conference on climate change.
People from all over the world want to see it – 40 years after I made it – because I was already talking about these ecological issues four decades ago.” (trueafrica.co ) “The imagery is in beautiful black and white. Faye notices the steam and smoke coming off village huts, the evening sunlight, the rituals of cooking and working. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, white Europeans made anthropological films about Africa but this is the insider’s story – beautiful, honest and with its own sense of time.” (Irish Film Institute) Shot in three weeks during a rainy season with a crew of three, Kaddu Beykat (LETTER FROM MY VILLAGE) was Safi Faye’s first feature-length film.
In a sparing, docu-drama style, Faye’s voiced-over letter to a friend is punctuated by sharp black and white images of her rural hometown, held captive by wildly fluctuating prices for its crops. Although Faye is deeply concerned with the economic crisis produced by a reliance on an outdated, colonial system meant to hamper self-sufficiency, she also warns against the corruption of the new Black middle class in the city.
African film critic Françoise Pfaff, describes Kaddu Beykat (LETTER FROM MY VILLAGE) as “soberly poetic yet politically effective.” The film was banned in Senegal. (Source: africanfilmny.org)