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 Ousmane Sembène 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.
“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
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The Silent Monologue
Directed by Khady Sylla | 45 mins | 2008
Khady Sylla’s docudrama inquiry into the lives—inner and exterior—of Dakar’s female domestics, which employs scenes of improvised street theater, direct-address freestyle screeds, candid interviews, and inner monologue musings with the end of allowing its ... -
A Single Word
Directed by Khady Sylla and Mariama Sylla | 63 mins | 2014
Begun by Sylla and completed by her sister, Mariama, after Khady’s death in 2013, "A Single Word" connects the essay film to the oral historical tradition of the griots—West African storytellers, musicians, and poets who act as repositori... -
Colobane Express
Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 1999
Losing ground to more modern forms of transit today, the colorfully painted “car rapide” minibuses that criss-cross the crowded streets and avenues of Dakar at breakneck speed carrying passengers and merchandise have been icons of the city since first appe... -
An Open Window
Directed by Khady Sylla | 52 mins | 2005
After an unsatisfactory attempt to make a film about the numerous mentally ill people who filled the streets of Dakar back in 1994, Sylla, in her own words “fell ill and crossed to the other side, seeing what others don’t see.” Now “living the experience f...
