Souleymane Cissé (born April 21, 1940) is a Malian film director, regarded as one of the first generation of African filmmakers. He has been called "Africa's greatest living filmmaker" while his film Yeelen has been called "conceivably the greatest African film ever made." Biography Born in Bamako and raised in a Muslim family, Souleymane Cissé was a passionate cinephile from childhood. He attended secondary school in Dakar and returned to Mali in 1960 after national independence. 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, Cinq jours d’une vie (Five Days in a Life), which tells the story of a young man who drops out of a Qur'anic school and becomes a petty thief living on the street. Cinq Jours premiered at the Carthage Film Festival. In 1974, Cissé produced his first full-length film in the Bambara language, Den muso (The Girl), the story of a young mute girl who has been raped. The girl becomes pregnant, and is rejected both by her family and by the child's father. Den muso was banned by the Malian Minister of Culture, and Cissé was arrested and jailed for the dubious charge of accepting French funding. Cissé would never know the real reason for his arrest, but while in jail he wrote the screenplay for his next film Baara (Work). Cissé would finish and release this film to much acclaim four years later, winning the Yenenga's Talon prize at Fespaco in 1979. In 1982, Cissé produced Finyé (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 (Light or Brightness), 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