Alliance Française of Washington, DC has the honor to present Fad, Jal by
Admission is free, but advance registration is required.
THE SCREENING WILL BE AT LECTURE HALL AT THE S. DILLON RIPLEY CENTER.
Fad, Jal (1979) | 112 min | France, Senegal | in Serer with English subtitles
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.”
Françoise Pfaff, Professor Emerita at Howard University
Françoise Pfaff is Professor Emerita at Howard University, where she taught French and Francophone Studies with a focus on literature and film from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean. The author of more than 50 articles, she has also written 3 books on African cinema: The Cinema of Ousmane Sembene, A Pioneer of African Film (1984), Twenty-five Black African Filmmakers (1988), and A l’écoute du cinéma sénégalais (2010). She edited Focus on African Films (2004) and is the author of two books on the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé. Françoise Pfaff was a Fulbright Scholar in Dakar, Senegal.
She has received several awards for her achievements as a teacher, translator, lecturer and author including the “Palmes Academiques” (1996) and the “Grand Prix de la Francophonie” presented to her in 2015.
Jean-Jacques Taty, Associate Professor of Cinema and Francophone Studies, Department of World Languages & Cultures, Howard University
Jean-Jacques Taty is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Francophone Studies in the Department of World Languages & Cultures at Howard University, where he has been since 2007. He is the supervisor of the French and Francophone Studies section. Jean-Jacques Taty completed his Ph.D. at the Sorbonne University in Paris and his undergraduate studies at the same institution, where he was an assistant professor before joining Howard University. His research interests lie in the area of postcolonial films/cinema and social change in developing countries, ranging from visual arts to literary works, film as a vehicle for narrative, representation, and theoretical concepts.