Safi Faye: Man sa yay | I, your mother - Berlinale Forum Special Fiktionsbescheinigung 2023

Safi Faye

Man sa yay | I, your mother

Berlinale

Forum Special Fiktionsbescheinigung 2023

Senegalese filmmaker/anthropologist Safi Faye spent the academic years from 1979 to 1981 at the faculty of the Freie Universität in Berlin as a guest professor. While in Germany, with an eye on the experiences of expatriate residents, in 1980 she directed Man Sa Yay (I, Your Mother). The film relates the experiences of a Senegalese student in Berlin during an exchange of letters with his family in Senegal, juxtaposed to his life in Berlin. Safi Faye would continue her ties with Germany with the co-production of Mossane, released in 1996, with Jürgen Jürges as the director of photography.

The Berlinale Forum Special Fiktionsbescheinigung 2023 features this 1980 film, co-produced with ZDF.

 

Safi Faye
Man sa yay | I, your mother
Federal Republic of Germany / Senegal 1980
with Moussa J. Sarr, Yay Sokhna, Yvonne Nafi
https://www.berlinale.de/en/2023/programme/202314603.html

Description
“Sooner or later, I’ll return to where my other self is.” The everyday experiences of a Senegalese student in West Berlin are marked by a sense of uneasiness in Europe and his family’s expectations in the form of a constant stream of letters.

From Berlinale Catalogue

By the time she produced Man sa yay for German television in 1980, Senegalese auteur Safi Faye had already honed her skills through an impressive suite of projects that reflect on life in her home nation. Effortlessly fluid in style, weaving together fiction, non-fiction, the essayistic and the epistolary, the film follows Moussa, a young student at Berlin’s Technische Universität. While he does connect with friends and lovers, he is primarily seen alone, working odd jobs, cooking or tidying his apartment. At home is where he reads the letters from family members and his partner in Senegal which structure the film. At once the centre of the film and a conduit for other lived experiences, Moussa serves to reflect and refract two distinct constellations of social connections. We learn of his loved ones in Senegal (including their wish lists of consumer goods from Europe). Such experiences and desires are mirrored by the sequences of his friends, other West African expatriates making due by hawking “African artifacts” on the street. In each case, we hear the repeated question, laden with longing in some cases, pitched as thinly veiled microaggression elsewhere: “When will you return?”