Cannes One To Watch: ‘Banel & Adama’ Writer-Director Ramata-Toulaye Sy On Representing Her Heritage In Debut Film
deadline.comSenegalese and French director Ramata-Toulaye Sy is only the second Black woman to make it into Competition in Cannes. Her debut feature, Banel & Adama, which had its debut Saturday, follows in the footsteps of Mati Diop’s 2019 Atlantics.
Sy draws on her roots in the Fulani, or Peul, culture of the Futa region in northern Senegal for her magic-realist film about a young couple whose passion brings chaos to their remote rural community. “The people of Futa have the reputation of being very dignified and sticking to their community,” says Sy, who was born and grew up in France. “I was raised in the Fulani tradition at home and French culture outside.” Inspiration for Banel & Adama came from a desire to create a tragic African heroine on par with Pierre Corneille’s Médée or Jean Racine’s Phèdre. “We don’t really have these mythical, tragic characters, or we do, but very few,” says Sy, who wrote the screenplay as her graduation work for the French film school La Fémis, where she studied screenwriting. “I didn’t want to direct.
Literature and writing are my passion,” she says, citing her favorite authors as Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jesmyn Ward, as well as William Faulkner.
But tragedy pushed Sy into the director’s chair after French producer Éric Névé, who had acquired the screenplay and was trying to get the project off the ground, died suddenly in 2019. “He was my godfather in the cinema world.
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