With her spectacular breakthrough at the Cannes Film Festival, the young Franco-Senegalese director Ramata-Toulaye Sy embodies the paradigm shift for the young generation of African directors. She achieved the feat of entering the official competition with her first film “Banel et Adama”.
They are five in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival 2023: the Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hani and the Franco-Senegalese Ramata-Toulaye Sy have the honor of being in the running for the Palme d’Or, the Sudanese Mohamed Kordofani, the Congolese Baloji Tshiani and the Moroccan Kamal Lazraq entered the prestigious Un certain regard section of the official selection. This is a real paradigm shift, because in this pantheon of cinema, where so far only the deans of African cinema have been admitted, and that only in dribs and drabs, a whole young generation is suddenly making his entrance with a crash.
Ramata-Toulaye Sy, the figurehead of an entire generation
As a woman and through the dazzling rise of her career – a first film at the age of 36 – the Franco-Senegalese Ramata-Toulaye Sy, born in Paris to Senegalese parents, will be the figurehead of this young generation of African directors and this unprecedented change in the history of African cinema at Cannes.
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For a long time, the name of Ramata-Toulaye Sy has appeared as a screenwriter, but it has been a very short time since the one who obtained a master’s degree in Performing Arts in cinema and audiovisual at the University of Paris Nanterre, also assumes the role of director. With her talent as a screenwriter, she attended and learned in 2018 alongside the Turkish director Çagla Zencirci and the French director Guillaume Giovanetti for their film sibel. In 2019, she prepared with Atiq Rahimi the adaptation of the book by the Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, Our Lady of the Nile.
“Astel”, a first short film
But it was only in April 2020, during confinement following the Covid-19 epidemic, that she decided to shoot her first short film. astel, awarded in 2021 at the Toronto International Film Festival and in 2022 at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, is part of the same environment as the feature film it sent to Cannes. This isolated region in the north of Senegal is called Fouta-Toro and seduced her by the presence of Peuls, to whom she feels very close to their culture, which favors the gaze and bodily gestures over words.
It is here, in this region and in this culture to which Ramata-Toulaye Sy feels very close, that she located the story of the young Astel. At 13, the latter goes through the passage from childhood to adolescence in a painful and happy way and tells how one becomes a woman. In Fouta-Toro will also take place the first feature film by Ramata-Toulaye Sy. She had started the scenario of Banel and Adamaseven years ago, at the end of his studies at the prestigious Fémis film school in Paris.
“Banel and Adama”, the story of a couple, told by a filmmaker-feminist
And as with astelthe message of Banel and Adama interpreted by Mamadou Diallo and Khady Mane, will be universal. His feature film lasting one hour and forty minutes plunges us into the life of a young couple in a small remote village in northern Senegal. A love shaken by the passions of hearts and bodies, but also by the constraints of a traditional society.
The place of women and the living conditions of women in contemporary society are particularly close to her heart. And it’s cinema that gave Ramata-Toulaye Sy the opportunity to tell stories in his own way. Among the icons who inspired and guided her during her career are the American writer Maya Angelou who had campaigned alongside Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison or the Nigerian writer and feminist activist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Ladj Ly, Mati Diop and Ramata-Toulaye Sy
Ramata-Toulaye Sy is not the first who cleverly uses the springboard of a short film to catapult herself into the Olympus of cinema. Before her, it was Ladj Ly who, with Wretched, had transformed a first test into an acclaimed feature film on the Croisette. In 2019, Mati Diop, Franco-Senegalese like her (and at the time also 36 years old), won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival with Atlantics, also based on a short film made nine years earlier. One thing is certain, for Ramata-Toulaye Sy, life after this Cannes Film Festival will no longer be the same.
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