French Senegalese Director Ramata-Toulaye Sy on Being Second Black Woman Vying for Palme d’Or: ‘I Hope That Soon This Will Be Taken for Granted’

Debutante director Ramata-Toulaye Sy will join one of world cinemas most select clubs when she climbs the stairs of the Grand Theatre Lumire on May 20 for the premiere of Banel Adama, which unspools in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It marks just the second time in the French fests 76-year history that a Black woman will compete for the Palme dOr, a glass ceiling that was shattered only four years ago by Sys French Senegalese compatriot, Mati Diop (Atlantics).

While acknowledging the honor, it is a club, Sy admits, about which she has some ambivalence. I really hope that soon all this will be taken for granted that we wont be counting the Black directors, that we wont be counting women, the helmer tells Variety. It means that theres still something wrong, that theres still something that hasnt become completely normal and natural.

With Banel Adama, billed as a female emancipation drama about two star-crossed lovers in northern Senegal, Sy will also join the short list of filmmakers competing for Cannes highest honor with their debut features among them Diop and another French Senegalese director, Ladj Ly (Les Misrables).

Sy was born and raised in a Parisian banlieue, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants. Film was an unlikely calling. My parents cant read and write. They had no connection with art or literature, she says. We wouldnt go to the movies.

After studying at Frances prestigious La Fmis film school, Sy co-wrote Atiq Rahimis Our Lady of the Nile, which played at Toronto, as well as agla Zencirci and Guillaume Giovanettis Locarno competition selection Sibel. She went on to direct her first short film, Astel, which screened at more than 80 international festivals.

While her early scripts drew on life in the banlieues, Sy set herself a challenge with Banel Adama to write a story that would be more literary, more lyrical, to have something very poetic in the writing to show that I didnt only belong to this background, she says. She was inspired by Greek tragedy, and classical heroines like Phaedra, Antigone and Medea, while also drawing on magical realism and the tradition of the West African griot. It would be, she hoped, the greatest love story in Africa.

Banel Adama is set in a remote Senegalese village and follows two lovers, played by first-time actors Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo, whose torrid romance spurns their families conservative mores and eventually brings chaos to a community where there is no room for passion, according to Sy. Gradually, the movie shifts its focus to Adama and becomes a meditation on a womans fight to fulfill herself.

Pic is produced by Eric Nv and Maud Leclair Nv at La Chauve-Souris (The Pirogue), and Margaux Juvnal at Take Shelter, with Souleymane Kb at Astou Production co-producing. Best Friends Forever is handling world sales.

Though raised in Paris, Sy traveled often to her parents native Senegal from childhood and visits frequently when shes not in the French capital. Culturally and spiritually, she is a product of both worlds. I feel completely Senegalese and French, she says.

When she began working on the script for Banel Adama nearly a decade ago, it was a radically different time for African cinema. I felt that all the stories about Africa dealt with poverty, with terrorism, with violence, she says.

Thats begun to change, thanks to a new generation like Diop and Sy, who describes her debut as a political gesture. Her Cannes premiere, she says, is a precious moment that shes spent years building toward. Its my life. Its my whole life.