Daughter of Water: the Films of Khady Sylla

The Dakar-born Sylla, who died at age 50 in 2013, packed an extraordinary amount of activity into a tragically truncated life: she was an author of novels and short stories before beginning in earnest her engagement with cinema, an intimate of filmmakers Djibril Diop Mambéty and Jean Rouch, a student of philosophy, and the rare female African filmmaker to garner some degree of recognition abroad: her An Open Window—which frankly addressed her struggle with schizophrenia—having won the first film prize at 2005’s FIDMarseille festival. A tribute to a multi-hyphenate artist who was blessed with extraordinary reserves of energy, ingenuity, and candor, introducing her entirely original approach to the essay and documentary film to a new audience.

“It is my honor to present, alongside her sister Mariama Sylla, the deeply poetic and politically resonant films of Khady Sylla, for the first time in New York. Through her intimate gaze, Sylla gave voice to the silenced and visibility to the unseen, transforming everyday life in Dakar into powerful cinema. With tenderness and urgency, her work blurs the line between filmmaker and subject, fiction and testimony. Her films remain both a quiet revolution and a lasting call ‘to create or, to perish,’ as she herself proclaimed.” —Johanna Makabi

With the support of Villa Albertine, the International Organization of the Francophonie, and Unifrance