Remembering Souleymane Cissé: An Uncompromising Pioneer of African Cinema

“It is essential to use the camera to keep imagining.” This was the belief of Souleymane Cissé, Malian filmmaker and titan of African cinema, who sadly passed away in February 2025 at the age of 84. Born in 1940 in Bamako, Mali under French colonial rule and raised in a Muslim family, Cissé’s belief in the transformative power of cinema stemmed from a childhood spent in movie theatres with his brothers. His interest in directing came from his experience as a projectionist in post-independence Mali, where a newsreel reporting the ruthless assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, took a young Cissé’s breath away. He was floored by the potential for cinema to be, in his own words, “an extraordinary tool of communication and expression.” And so his training began–first as a projectionist and studying photography, eager to immerse himself in the field of image-making before he gained his certification in directing through a scholarship at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. Dedication to the craft is often ridiculed in the context of actors devoting themselves to their roles; for Cissé, it was necessary work.

Alongside peers like Ousmane Sembène (the “father” of African cinema) and Sarah Maldoror (one of the first Black women to shoot a film in Africa), Cissé was considered a pioneer of African cinema. His work was defined by an uncompromising drive to depict African culture on screen and a strict refusal to cater to the Western gaze. He refused to film his projects in the colonial language of French, instead producing films in his native tongue, Bambara. This insistence on rebellion made him a constant target of his government, but that never stopped him.

His first narrative feature, Den Muso (1975, ‘The Girl’) probed the intersections of gender and class in postcolonial Mali, and established a wholly unique filmmaking style. The film follows a young mute girl who is sexually assaulted and subsequently ostracised by her family. In place of spoken dialogue, Cissé relies on a certain visual grammar to convey the isolation felt by his protagonist through image alone with the use of cramped interiors, harsh shadows, and oppressive blocking. “What is most important for me,” he stated in a 2023 interview with MUBI, “is the image, the discovery of the image, the profound contemplation that the image can invite a person into.” When you watch a Souleymane Cissé film, this profound respect for the power of an image can be felt in every frame.

Den Muso was banned by Malian authorities for its “socially destabilising” content, and Cissé was jailed on the rather dubious charge of accepting French funding for his work. The real reason for his arrest would never be revealed – though one could hazard a guess – but this was of little concern to the director. He had found his wings as a radical filmmaker unafraid to disrupt the status quo, and he spent his time in jail working on his next feature, Baara (1978, ‘Work’), which would release to much acclaim.

From the outset, Cissé positioned himself as a director whose work could not be separated from the political. He embodied philosopher and poet Aimé Césaire’s notion of art as “combat for liberation” and through filmmaking he encouraged his audience to speak truth to power. Always critical of puppet governments propped up in the years following independence from colonial rule, Cissé, like his contemporaries, used his work to interrogate the incendiary political climate of his country. Baara examined the relationship between labour and capital in postcolonial Mali, and through Cissé’s lens, the rhythmic actions of labourers moving in tandem under the sweltering heat of the factory were juxtaposed with images of the postcolonial elite in air-conditioned offices, the money accumulated as a result of the labourers’ efforts passed back to French and American businessmen. It was a direct, intentional contrast used to highlight the kind of power structure that is often present – and interrogated – in Cissé’s work.

In 1982’s Finye (‘The Wind’), it’s the imbalance of power between the dispossessed Malian youth and an oppressive military regime that takes centre stage. The film depicts the growing relationship between Bah, the daughter of a stern Senegalese military governor, and Batrou, the grandson of a traditional Bambara chief. Though trained in the social realism of Soviet Russia, Cissé found greater inspiration in the spiritual tradition of his ancestral lands, thus Finye explores the possibilities of resistance through a student uprising supported by the mystical power of Bambara ancestors. The film received praise from his compatriots, but Cissé still faced challenges of distribution and presentation.

It was only with the release of Yeelen (1987, ‘Brightness’ or ‘Light’) that the director would find global recognition. The film screened at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival where it won the prestigious Jury Prize, marking the first major win for a sub-Saharan African director at the festival. After this, there was what Cissé referred to as a “reverberation” through Europe as Western audiences began to discover his work. The director would spend the next 40 years ticking off an imaginary checklist of all the milestones non-Western filmmakers are expected to strive towards: his film Waati (‘Time’) competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1995, Baara was screened at the 2019 New York African Film Festival, and more recently, restorations of his films have been screened in London. In 2023, Cissé returned to Cannes to be presented with the Carrosse d’Or honouring his life’s work.

Still, Cissé’s greatest achievements lie not in his awards, but in his impact on West African cinema. Though Mali possessed little by way of cinematic infrastructure, artists like Cissé and Manthia Diawara strove to establish Mali as a hub for West African cinema, and they succeeded. I see glimmers of Cissé’s imagination in the blend of narrative storytelling with non-fiction in Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024), and his influence is written all over the mystical Omen from Congolese director Baloji. Even Martin Scorsese described Yeelen as “one of the great revelatory moviegoing experiences of my life.” Cissé’s fingerprints can be found in the work of countless artists, and his unique approach to filmmaking – his weaving of the metaphysical with the everyday, the textual richness of his films, his insistence on not just critiquing power, but peeling away at the ideological layers that allow for such power to exist – will be his greatest legacy.

No amount of superlatives can do Souleymane Cissé justice. He was a trailblazer, a genius, the best of his generation. Above all else, he was a revolutionary. A conjurer of worlds far beyond the limited scope of his realist training, Cissé redefined what it meant to a filmmaker. He grounded the role in pedagogical roots and harnessed the liberatory power of cinema to raise his audience to political consciousness. For Cissé, to be a filmmaker was to be a storyteller, and storytelling was the key to liberation.

When he passed at a clinic in Bamako on February 19, it came as a surprise. Cissé was set to chair the jury at the 29th edition of FESPACO, Africa’s oldest and most venerated film festival, the very next day. Even at the age of 84, he remained dedicated to nurturing a film culture in his country. In his life, Cissé was known as “Africa’s greatest living filmmaker”; in his death, he will be remembered as a visionary whose impact on cinema will be felt for as long as the medium shall live. If the camera is how we access another way of being, then Souleymane Cissé spent 50 years showing us how to use it. Now, it is our turn to do the imagining.