Letter from My Village / Kaddu Beykat
Safi Faye
Senegal, 1975, 95 min.
Wolof and French with English subtitles

Shot in three weeks during the rainy season with a crew of three, Letter from My Village was Safi Faye's first feature-length film. In a sparse, docu-drama style, the director’s voice-over letter to a friend is punctuated by stark black and white images of her rural hometown, held captive by wildly fluctuating prices for its crops. Catching the idiosyncracies of the villagers, she chronicles routine events from dawn to dusk: workers toiling in dusty fields, the unchanging rituals of courtship, the evening meeting of elders under the “chattering tree.” Although Faye is deeply concerned with the economic crisis created by reliance on a colonial system designed to dampen local self-sufficiency, she also warns against the corruption of the new Black middle class. African film critic Françoise Pfaff describes Letter from My Village as “soberly poetic yet politically effective,” so effective in fact, that the film was banned in Senegal.