[The following text was originally published on the website of the Locarno Film Festival.]

“You’re going to spend some time at my home,” remarks a calming voice over images of modest rural life. These words, by pioneering Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye, are at once an invitation and an instruction. They introduce Faye’s piercing debut feature Letter from My Village (Kaddu Beykat, 1975), winner of the third edition of Locarno Heritage Restoration Contest – following Alberto Cavalcanti’s A Real Woman (1954) in 2023 and Liliana Cavani’s The Year of the Cannibals (1969) in 2024 – which has been restored by Cinegrell and is being presented at this year’s Festival.

Born in Dakar in 1943 and a teacher by trade, Faye was drawn to filmmaking out of a desire to learn more about her own Serer heritage. In 1966, at the World Festival of Black Arts, she met the prolific French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch, who cast her in his keen ethnographical satire. Little by Little (1970) – a shoot that took her to Paris, among other cities. A few years later, Faye moved to the French capital to study ethnography at the Sorbonne, and soon decided to supplement those studies with training in filmmaking at the Louis Lumière Film School. Her doctoral research, which she defended in 1979, became the bedrock for Letter, a docudrama she made with minimal means over the course of two trips back home in as many years.

Faye set her film in her ancestral village of Fad’jal, a drought-stricken agrarian community in Senegal’s west, near the coast. Caught between traditional practices and a modern global economy, its inhabitants experience the pangs of aggressive nationalisation. Farmers, forced to produce groundnuts for upmarket European export, see their sustenance threatened, while children, in imitation of what they witness, play games involving evil tax collectors. Against this backdrop, Faye introduces the young lovers Ngor (Assane Faye) and Coumba (Maguette Gueye): they hope to get married, but an inadequate monsoon means that Ngor is unable to grow enough produce to secure the dowry money.

Ngor and Coumba’s love story helps Faye to lay bare the gendered division of labour in the village: men till the land, and women perform household duties in addition to tilling the land. Children, meanwhile, are enlisted to help the older women, who are also obliged to work the fields. A delay in the rain means that the men get a break, but there’s no end to the women’s responsibilities – a situation that Faye would examine to harrowing effect in her 1983 short Selbe: One Among Many. Hoping to raise money for the wedding, Ngor moves to the city to look for work. There, gender roles are ironically reversed, as he performs domestic chores for demanding middle-class housewives.

With unflinching patience, Faye and her cinematographer Patrick Fabry film people engaged in unceasing work. Their repetitive gestures acquire a lyrical, rhythmic quality that is reflective of the cyclical nature of agrarian life. In her next feature, Fad’jal (1979), Faye would organise these gestures into an audiovisual symphony of tremendous force, an electrifying cine-ballad that weaves together labour, leisure, ceremony and laughter. “Fad’jal means ‘work’,” notes a griot in that film. “He who works is happy, he who doesn’t is ridiculed.” In both films, work becomes both an existential necessity and an expression of vibrant communal life.

Remarkably, Letter prefigures modern documentary style in how it conveys factual information largely through fictionalised exchanges between real individuals rather than through voiceover or intertitles. Most memorable in this respect are the film’s ensemble scenes, in which village elders, seated under a palaver tree, reminisce about a time of abundance in their lives and rue present-day scarcity. At one point, they interrupt the local teacher reading out a news item on Senegal’s lofty new political vision: “For me, politics means I eat only one meal a day for half the year,” one declares. “For us, politics means our daughters get no dowry and young men have no money,” adds another.

Letter echoes this chorus of laments, making a scathing assessment of the newly independent nation’s agricultural policies, still hostage to colonial economic mandates. With stunning clarity, Faye illustrates the fallout of the government’s ruthless push for cash crops: shortage of cultivable land for food, soil depletion, vulnerability to weather phenomena, diminishing purchasing power, and second-order effects such as urban migration and the increasing workload of rural women. The film illustrates these issues not in the manner of a lecture, but as concrete dramatic forces that work to thwart Ngor and Coumba’s marriage.

Despite the romantic subplot, Faye’s film refrains from getting into the inner lives of its young leads – that would be the purview of her last, and only fictional, feature, Mossane (1996) – instead maintaining a certain observational distance. However, the matter-of-fact way in which their bare bodies are filmed, free from colonial notions of shame, and their religious rituals presented, without editorial comment, clearly mirrors the intimate view of an insider. Mixing ethnography with a dash of fiction, Faye’s trenchant film paints a wide-ranging picture of life in the village – her village, but also a stand in for rural economies in newly independent nations across the globe.