Cannes Film Festival is the first-time filmmaker whose debut feature has been admitted to the exclusive Main Competition lineup.
That section is normally the domain of veteran directors who’ve been to Cannes before (the names Scorsese, Loach, Kore-eda, Wenders, Kaurismaki and Rohrwacher might ring a bell this year), but a Senegalese-French director named Ramata-Toulaye Sy has joined the 2023 ranks with “Banel & Adama,” her first feature after one short and a couple of writing credits.Hers is the first debut film to land in the Main Competition since Mati Diop’s “Atlantics” and Ladj Ly’s “Les Miserables” did so four years ago; the former film made the Oscar shortlist in the Best International Feature Film category and the latter was nominated for that award.
In the past decade, the only other first films to crash the competition were Abu Bakr Shawky’s “Yomeddine” in 2018 and Laszlo Nemes’ Oscar-winning “Son of Saul” in 2015.So Sy is in rarefied company, and even more rarefied as a female director from Africa in the Cannes competition. (Diop was the first ever in 2019; Sy is the second.) She’s achieved that distinction with a film that feels assured, not tentative – in fact, when it opens with two characters walking through tall grass with their arms outstretched, accompanied by gentle whispers and stately piano music on the soundtrack, it feels like nothing so much as a West African spin on the free-form reveries of Terrence Malick.
The lyricism of “Banel & Adama” continues to make nods to Malick, but it’s also visually distinctive and drenched in color: a bright yellow shirt, rich orange fabrics, the vivid blue of a river even as it falls into shadow.
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