NOTE: This program has a rescheduled date (originally March 23, 2020).
REGISTRATION NOTE: Free event, reservations required via EventBrite.
As part of the month-long Francophonie Cultural Festival DC, the Alliance Française of Washington, DC and Smithsonian Associates present a free screening of Fad, Jal directed by Safi Faye.
In Fad, Jal, which premiered at Cannes in 1979, the groundbreaking Senegalese-French filmmaker and ethnologist Safi Faye investigates traditions of storytelling through a beautiful portrait of her ancestral farming village. Faye recalls, “Every evening, the children scrambled up into the beautiful kapok trees after getting out of school to gather around the village elder. He would then pass on their history, which hasn’t been written down. Fad’jal speaks of this, of the foundation of the village and all the events that have since unfolded there.”
After the screening, Jean-Jacques Taty, an associate professor of cinema and Francophone studies in the department of world languages and cultures at Howard University, and Françoise Pfaff, professor emerita at Howard, where she taught French and Francophone studies, discuss the film and lead a Q&A session.
(1979, 112 min., France/Senegal, Serer with English subtitles)
