Ouestafnews – Launched in Senegal in 2023, CinéFemFest is both a film festival and a space for testimonies and reflection centered on women. In 2024, the event honored five Senegalese women, pioneers and successors of feminism, including the writer Ken Bugul. Ouestaf News returns to this event, presented by its initiators as an opportunity to “discuss the films of African filmmakers whose key roles are often unknown to the general public”.
“This year (in 2024, Editor’s note), we decided to celebrate contemporary women,” indicated the Senegalese Rama Salla Dieng, director of CinéFemFest, at the opening of the “African Festival of Feminist Film and Research”, named after complete of this event.
The second edition of the event was held from October 31 to November 3, 2024 in Toubab Dialaw, a coastal town about fifty kilometers southeast of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. On the program: screenings of Senegalese, African and diaspora films, panels, concerts as well as an exhibition, a storytelling session and a visit to cultural places in the city.
Among the contemporary feminists selected to be celebrated there – the “muses” of the festival – were the writer Ken Bugul, the sociologist and professor Fatou Sow as well as the researcher and journalist Codou Bop, among the pioneers of feminist struggles in Senegal. Documentarian and journalist Mame Woury Thioubou, screenwriter and producer Kalista Sy, from younger generations, completed the list.
According to Rama Salla Dieng, it was important for CinéFemFest to pay tribute to them during their lifetime. But also for many reasons listed in a “manifesto” for the 2024 edition. For example, Ms. Dieng read to the audience, “love us alive. With our faults”, or even “Find the words and otherwise invent them to define ourselves (…). Because from them, we define ourselves and we create our feminist realities. Our feminism in its entirety.” “And these five women that we have around this table, this is what they spent their lives doing,” she emphasized.
“Speaking out for women”
The first CinéFemFest was held in June 2023 on the island of Gorée, off the coast of Dakar, at the initiative of Rama Salla Dieng, teacher-researcher, and two other Senegalese women: Tabara Korka Ndiaye, political scientist and cultural actress, as well as Ndèye Debo Seck, journalist, teacher, photographer. All three are active women’s rights activists.
The 2023 festival put the spotlight on the deceased Senegalese filmmakers Khady Sylla and Safi Faye. In 2023 as in 2024, the participants in CinéFemFest, mainly women, were filmmakers, academics, researchers, activists, artists… These profiles were joined by tourists at the screenings, residents of the host localities . And, in the case of Toubab Dialaw, staff members at the seaside resort, dotted with shimmering flowering plants, which hosted the majority of the festival’s activities.
“I believe it is very important that feminists look at society and carry their message,” Professor Fatou Sow told the press after the opening ceremony. According to her, the voices that express themselves within the framework of CinéFemFest “analyze our societies and explain what are the difficulties, what are the problems, what are the opportunities for which women must give their voice”. CinéFemFest “also allows, through women’s cinema, to speak out for women,” she added.
According to the organizing committee, CinéFemFest “is an opportunity to celebrate and discuss the films of African filmmakers whose key roles are often unknown to the general public”. For 2024, the emphasis was placed “on the work of immensely talented filmmakers, who are still very little known despite their important filmography”. In the lot, Mame Woury Thioubou and Kalista Sy.
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“Presumption of incompetence because one is a woman”, in the words of Senegalese cultural journalist Oumy Régina Sambou; lack of decision or career support from loved ones; daily struggle in environments dominated by men such as that of recovery in the largest landfill of Mbeubeuss, near Dakar; injunctions to marry or have children; sexual, physical or verbal violence: so many topics raised during discussions between women or testimonies heard after public screenings.
“What to do together? »
“I listened more than anything else in fact, because there were so many beautiful minds,” Mame Woury Thioubou, author of the documentary films “5 Stars,” “Rebeuss, Chambre 11” and “Fifiiré en pays cuballo” (pronounced “thiouballo”, Editor’s note).
CinéFemFest 2024 “was truly an extraordinary moment” just by being “next to all these ladies”, added Ms. Thioubou, judging the word muse “very, very strong” for herself. “I haven’t (had) a lot of reading on feminism,” admitted the director, welcoming the opportunity to rub shoulders with pioneers of the struggles for women’s rights in Senegal and younger feminists. These personalities “who dissect what is happening in our society” help “to become aware of many things, and this opens up new avenues of reflection”, she continued.
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“The role that I have today, and that we have as women, is really to show the experience and the reality,” also declared at the opening of the festival Kalista Sy, who notably wrote and produces the successful Senegalese series “Mistress of a Married Man” and “Yaay 2.0”. “We can’t move forward if we don’t see each other. If we don’t see all the suffering we have, if we don’t see the hopes, the expectations we have and if we don’t make the generational legacy today. »
Among the very active festival-goers was the Maliano-Senegalese Coumba Touré, author of children’s books and publisher, who celebrates women actors of change in their communities with her project “Invisible Giants”. In an interview with Ouestaf News, she appreciated CinéFemFest as “a space for exchanges, a space for learning”, which also allows “to witness a discomfort in our society in relation to women”,
However, said Ms. Touré, the initiatives should continue beyond the period or framework of the event, bringing together people mostly carrying out individual actions or activities in favor of women’s rights. “The big question is: what can we do together? And one of the ideas”, she clarified, “is to have a common platform where we would put feminist films, since it is so difficult to find them and see them outside of festival spaces”.
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