Letter from my Village
(Kaddu Beykat)

Lettre, paysanne: the two words of the French title must be stressed. The first feature length film to be directed by a woman from sub-Saharan Africa is a paysan film – a film located in country life and cultivating the earth, shaped by seasons, harvests, drought. This farming life overflows into the fates of the characters that traverse the film, right up to the children’s games, to the city the men roam. But the film is also a letter, something written from home and addressed to somewhere else. Its greatest force is this speaking. Coming from a background of ethnology, Safi Faye flips the usual, distanced gaze of ethnographic filmmaking by setting her own voice over these pictures, firmly and discreetly, the voice of a farmers’ daughter that tells us: look how we work, how we live in my village. AR