Cinema
The Woman with the Knife
La Femme au couteau
Timité Bassori · 1969
Synopsis
A young Ivorian intellectual returns to Abidjan after five years of study in Europe. He struggles to reconcile what he learned there with the traditions of his country, and his love affairs suffer for it. Above all, a woman haunts him, who appears before him brandishing a knife; to free himself of her, he seeks help in turn from traditional medicine and from psychoanalysis imported from Europe.
Context
The film was shot in black and white and on 35 mm, produced by the Société ivoirienne de cinéma, and the author himself plays the lead, opposite Marie Vieyra. Selected at Locarno in 1969, then at the second Fespaco in 1970, it was restored as part of the African heritage preservation project that brings together the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers, Unesco, the Cineteca di Bologna and the Film Foundation, and shown in Bologna and at Fespaco in 2019.
Who it is for
A film of an hour and twenty minutes, in French, in black and white: a psychological drama in which visions mingle with the narrative.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a classic of African cinema and as its author's most accomplished work; it is also seen as the first Ivorian fiction feature film.