TEHRAN- Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, who is regarded as one of the first generation of African filmmakers, will participate in the 17th edition of Iran International Documentary Film Festival Cinéma Vérité, which will be held in Tehran from December 18 to 23.

Cissé is set to hold a session at the event, where he will speak about the African film industry, ISNA reported on Monday.

The 83-year-old director has been called Africa's greatest living filmmaker while his film “Yeelen” (AKA Brightness) (1987) has been called conceivably the greatest African film ever made, 

Born in Bamako and raised in a Muslim family, Cissé was a passionate cinephile from childhood. His film career began as an assistant projectionist for a documentary on the arrest of Patrice Lumumba. This triggered his desire to create films of his own, and he obtained a scholarship at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography, the Moscow school of Cinema and Television.

In 1970 he returned to Mali, and joined the Ministry of Information as a cameraman, where he produced documentaries and short films. Two years later, he produced his first medium-length film, “Five Days in a Life”.

In 1974, Cissé produced his first full-length film “The Young Girl”. His second movie “Work” was released four years later and won the Yenenga's Talon prize at Fespaco in 1979.

In 1982, Cissé produced “The Wind”, which tells the story of dissatisfied Malian youth rising up against the establishment. This earned him his second Yenenga's Talon, at 1983's Fespaco.

Between 1984 and 1987, he produced “Yeelen,” a coming-of-age film that won the Jury Prize at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first African film to win a prize in the festival's history. Often cited as his greatest work, Cissé stated in an interview for Cahiers du Cinéma that it was “in part made in opposition to European ethnographic films” and that he “wanted to make a response to an external perception, a perception by white technicians and academics, an alien perception.”

In 1995, he produced “Time,” which also competed for the Palme d'Or at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival.

Being the president of UCECAO, the Union of Creators and Entrepreneurs of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts of Western Africa, Cissé is one of the most recognized African filmmakers of the 20th century, and his work exemplifies the development of social realism in African cinema, including its eventual movement towards the recovery of tradition.

Cissé has also been called “a master of complex storytelling, preserving the mysterious in the mundane.” His films have been known for their uncompromising depictions of military violence, abuse of money and power, trade unionism, and the enduring stranglehold of patriarchal traditions over Bamako's women and youth.

The 17th Cinéma Vérité will be organized by the Documentary & Experimental Film Center (DEFC). It aims to represent the history and culture of Iranian Islamic society and present a real picture of what human is facing today in his/her individual and social life through documentary films.

With this objective, the special focus of this edition of the festival is on two national and international challenges: the water crisis and population issues.

A total of 2,454 documentaries from around the world have been submitted to the event including 615 works are from Iran and 1,839 foreign documentaries from Turkey, China, the U.K., Russia, Poland, Spain, Egypt, Argentina, Indonesia, and Germany among others.

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