Safi Faye with and against the United Nations

This article examines the development films of Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye (1943–2023), produced by UN agencies and nongovernmental development organizations within a Women in Development (WID) policy framework. While these commissions enabled Faye’s practice as one of the most prolific women filmmakers of Africa’s postindependence generation, they also imposed significant formal, discursive, and institutional constraints. Through close readings of Les âmes au soleil (1981) and Tesito (1989), alongside archival research into unrealized projects, I argue that Faye mobilized the generic forms and epistemic assumptions of WID as sites of immanent critique. Her films both register and contest the narrowing of development’s horizon in the era of structural adjustment, insisting on economic self-sufficiency and decolonization over market integration. In doing so, they challenge dominant feminist and development paradigms from a situated, materialist perspective, reimagining development through African women’s embodied knowledge and lived experience.