Winners
Winner 2007
Khady Sylla
Khady Sylla (44) from Senegal, was awarded a US $5,000 grant for her film “Le monologue de la muette” (The Monologue of the Dumb)
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Ami works as maid for a well-to-do family in Dakar, Senegal. She works twelve hours or more a day. The women in the household never leaves her alone. She’s paid a pittance and even accused of stealing a head of cabbage.
Ami lives in a crowded shantytown. Her only hope for escape lies with her husband, Omar. But Omar works far away in the province of Casamance, and only comes home for rare, short visits.
Ami gives birth in her husband’s village during the rainy season. She’s then made to work on the land of her in-laws, where she earns nothing at all. Her life appears in a dead end. Does she listen to fortune-tellers like Fatim, the rapper, or Josephine, the revolutionary?
There are fifty thousand Serere maids in Dakar. Why does the freedom of some take place on the backs of others?
Financing is difficult to obtain for documentary films, which are wrongly considered to be a minor genre. Yet documentary requires investments, just as fiction does. My film required two weeks of location scouting, two shooting and editing phases which lasted two months each. The grant from the Alter-Ciné Foundation helped finance the second editing phase and allowed us to obtain the final results, the documentary “Le monologue de la muette”. Thank you.
– Khady Sylla