FINYÉ/THE WIND (1982, Mali, 100 min.), directed by Souleymane Cissé; screenplay by Souleymane Cissé; cinematography by Étienne Carton de Grammont; edited by Andrée Davanture; with Fousseyni Sissoko (Bâ); Goundo Guissé (Batrou); Balla Moussa Keita (Col. Sangaré, the Governor), Omou Diarra (Agna, the Third Wife); Sumayila Sar/Ismaila Sarr (The Grandfather), Dioncounda Kone (Bâ’s Grandmother), Massitan Ballo (Batrou’s Mother). In Bambara with English subtitles.

--Finyé

Born in Bamako, Mali, in 1940, Souleymane Cissé is one of Africa’s pre-eminent directors, with a varied body of creative work. As a young man, he worked as a photographer and a projectionist in Mali. From 1963 to 1969 he studied filmmaking in Moscow at the State Institute of Cinema, where a number of other future African directors (including the great Ousmane Sembène) received a firm grounding in the technical art of cinema under the accomplished Soviet director Mark Donskoi.

Cissé returned to Mali in 1969, where he went to work for the Ministry of Information as a documentary filmmaker. He made his first short fiction film, Five Days in a Life, in 1972, then his first feature, Den Muso/The Young Girl, in 1975. This was followed by Baara/The Porter in 1978, which won the Best Film and Best Actor awards at the Carthage Film Festival, along with major awards at Naumur and Locarno. It was followed by Finyé/Wind in 1982 (which won the Grand Prize at the 1983 Pan-African Film Festival), Yeelen/Brightness in 1987 (which won many international awards, including the Jury Award at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival), and Waati/Time in 1995.

Cissé was recently named the recipient of the fifth annual Genevieve McMillan and Reba Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking at Harvard.

Along with his work as a director, Cissé has been a tireless advocate for African cinema. Convinced that a viable and sustainable African film industry can only be built through a pan-African, collective effort by filmmakers, he has been instrumental in the creation of UCECAO, the Initiative for the Promotion of Industry and Audio-Visual in West Africa. At the end of this month he will be hosting in Bamako a major convocation of African film directors, producers, technicians, and others working in film in further pursuit of this goal..

It is a great honor to have Souleymane Cissé with us in Portland for the opening of the 15^th Cascade Festival of African Films.

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Conceived as the first part of Cissé’s natural-forces trilogy, which would include Yeelen (Brightness or Light) and Waati (Time), Finyé can be seen as a bridge linking the social realism of Baara (1978) with the magical realism of Yeelen (1987). Like both Yeelen and Waati, the central dynamic of the film revolves around the attempts of young people to find themselves, assert themselves, and rid the world of the forces of repression and self-serving power. Here, the young people are two students, Bâ and Batrou, he the scion of once-powerful family, she the daughter of a high official in the military dictatorship then ruling the country.

The film opens with the sound of the wind and the image of a young boy superimposed over waves, approaching the camera and gazing offscreen expectantly. We are then introduced to Bâ and his fellow students, studying desperately for the life-or-death exam that will determine their ability to secure a university scholarship and thereby gain access to success and privilege. In a manner familiar to students all over the world, they take amphetamines to stay awake and catch up on the studying that they presumably neglected to do earlier. When this stratagem fails miserably, the console themselves with marijuana. A nice kid, Bâ is a passive drifter; he has good intentions, but not much direction. Adults refer to him as a foolish good-for-nothing, and at this point they are not far off.

We are then introduced to Bâ’s girlfriend, Batrou, whose father is a colonel in the Army and the military governor of the region. Batrou’s mother is the Governor’s first wife. He has three, and his third—the high-spirited Agna (played by Omou Diarra, who played the engineer’s wife in Baara), is barely older than Batrou. The Governor, played by the great Balla Moussa Keita, who has appeared in a number of films shown in the Festival over the years, including Cissé’s Baara (as the Director) and Yeelen (as the Peul king), is the embodiment of ruthless power and male privilege. Batrou begins the film as an outwardly obedient daughter, taking for granted her comfortable lifestyle and the other benefits of her father’s privilege (she of all the students doesn’t need to take the exams). As the film progresses, she will gain a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of that privilege, and will come to reject it, openly and publicly.

This is a bad time for Bâ. Not only has he failed his exams, but he finds himself generally reviled for his drug use, and his relationship with Batrou is on-again-off-again. She loves him, but she is losing patience. His grandparents, with whom he lives (his parents are not present; we know that his father was a famous man, a rival to the Governor, and one might speculate that he was killed by the regime) are on the verge of disowning him. The General forbids his daughter from seeing him, and Bâ’s grandfather is no less opposed to their union. Still, he dreams that things will work out for him, and carries with him a naïve vision of their happiness. The film cuts to this romantic vision while he is smoking pot—it involves him, Batrou, and the mysterious boy who opens the film.

Bâ gradually realizes that some of his comrades, including his good friend, the hapless Seydou, are active in the student protest movement in opposition to the regime. Stumbling upon their pamphlet-printing operation, Bâ narrowly escapes arrest when the police raid the place. He initially wants no part of their politics. Eventually, though, he does join Batrou and the other students in protesting against their school’s headmaster, and is arrested with them. He is driven to political awareness by his victimization by the repressive system. He finally asserts himself, standing up to the Governor by refusing to sign the confession that would presumably win him his freedom. In so doing, he is standing up not only to the man who is Batrou’s father, but to everything the Governor represents. He thereby earns Batrou’s respect and a term in prison, from which he will emerge a very different person.

At this point the film takes a turn that brings it close to the magical world of Yeelen, the world of myth, legend, and traditional values. Bâ’s grandfather, Kansaye (played by the powerful Ismaila Sarr, who was the foreman in Baara and Uncle Bafing in Yeelen), has had enough of this repressive regime and particularly its treatment of Bâ, the last member of his lineage. We’ve already seen Kansaye as a stern, authoritarian figure, not one to be crossed, certainly not by his weak grandson. But now he reveals himself fully as a man of traditional wisdom and power, able to summon the forces of nature and the ancestors. In a marvelous scene in an ancient grove of trees, wearing the traditional garb of a Bambara hunter, he communes with the fetishes there and enlists their power to his cause. Their assent is signaled with an incredible series of images (we will see similar images in Yeelen and Waati) of a sheep running in slow motion towards him, and then past him. He will henceforth be impervious to bullets and will carry the force that will henceforth inform the young challengers. On a spiritual level, he provides a viable and formidable alternative to the authority figures represented by the Governor, to those who cling jealously to power. Ritualistically setting fire to his traditional robe, Kansaye tells the young protesters that his generation’s time is over and the world is theirs, thereby giving the authority of tradition to their effort. Miraculously, they prevail, at least temporarily, and the film concludes with the opening blissful vision of potential and promise.

In reality, young Malians would have to wait ten years after the making of Finyé for the military regime of Moussa Traoré to crumble. But with this film—and with Yeelen as well—Souleymane Cissé gave them powerful images of hope and resolve.

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