Paulin Soumanou Vieyra at 100: a quiet construction

While African filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé are now rightly hailed as masters of the form, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra was the architect working behind the scenes: enabling, documenting and defending a self-defined cinema that had barely begun to take shape. Though he directed a handful of influential shorts, his deeper legacy lies in what he made possible – a networked African film culture with its own institutions, its own historians and, crucially, its own image.

Vieyra occupies a pioneering place in African cinema history – as the first sub-Saharan African admitted to Paris’s IDHEC film school (now La Fémis), the French state institution that trained many of the country’s post-war directors; and as co-director with Mamadou Sarr of Africa on the Seine (1955). Often cited as one of the earliest cinematic works by a French-speaking African, it was shot in Paris because colonial authorities, under the 1934 Laval Decree, forbade African filmmakers from using professional film equipment on their own soil – a restriction meant to keep image-making in colonial hands and prevent political expression. The film captures the isolation and longing of diasporic life, but also a quiet assertion of identity. There is a melancholy in the footage as students stroll the banks of the Seine, their gazes both present and elsewhere. The narration, reflective and searching, speaks of exile and dislocation, while scenes of everyday Parisian life – cafés, bridges, quiet streets – pass with a kind of removed curiosity. The film doesn’t dramatise alienation; it registers it in pauses, glances and rhythms. Its tone is neither angry nor celebratory, but suspended – caught between home and host country, between presence and absence.

After Senegal’s independence in 1960, Vieyra returned and assumed a central role in shaping the country’s national cinema. As director of Actualités Sénégalaises – a government-backed newsreel unit – and later, of the Senegalese Office for Radio and Television (ORTS), he oversaw not just film production but the creation of a media infrastructure. These institutions became crucial in a context in which private industry and international investment were scarce. Vieyra helped direct state resources toward film as a tool of national self-representation and cultural development. His own documentaries from this period, including A Nation Is Born (1961), blend official record and poetic reflection, capturing Senegal’s first years as a sovereign state with the precision of someone who understood both the moment’s importance and the role of images in defining it.

Beyond his own films, Vieyra’s role as a facilitator had the most lasting impact. He supported several of Sembène’s early works, such as Borom Sarret (1963) and Mandabi (1968), helping him to navigate state bureaucracy, unlock resources and manage production logistics. On Xala (1974), he is formally credited as a producer. The relationship between the two men was foundational: Sembène brought the political vision and narrative voice; Vieyra the operational infrastructure and diplomatic finesse. It’s not an exaggeration to say that without Vieyra, Sembène’s trajectory might not have been possible – or certainly not as swift and sustained. Vieyra’s quiet, often uncredited labour behind the camera was as essential as any storyboard.

Sembène was far from the only beneficiary. Vieyra mentored and supported a generation of Senegalese filmmakers, including Ababacar Samb Makharam and Djibril Diop Mambéty. Both would go on to make landmark works – Makharam with Jom ou l’histoire d’un peuple (1981), a historical film composed of episodic scenes set across different periods of Senegal’s past, and Mambéty with Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992) – films that pushed the form in bold new directions. The image of Vieyra in this period – watchful, with a quiet intensity – is as emblematic as any still from the films he enabled.

Vieyra understood the need for collective infrastructure. He was a founding member of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (Fepaci) in 1969 and played a key role in supporting the development of Fespaco, the film festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, which is now the largest in Africa. These were not just celebratory spaces. They were built to circumvent colonial-era systems of distribution and recognition, and to give African filmmakers control over how and where their work circulated. In creating institutions such as Fepaci and Fespaco, filmmakers asserted ownership – not just of their stories, but of the structures around them.

Vieyra’s vision extended to scholarship. As a critic and historian, he wrote Le Cinéma et l’Afrique (1969) and Le Cinéma africain des origines à 1973 (1975), among the first works to systematically document the emergence of African cinema. He also wrote frequently for Présence Africaine, the influential Paris-based journal and publishing house that gave a platform to Black intellectuals and artists from Africa and the diaspora. His writing was both advocacy and historiography, pushing for African cinema to be made, remembered and interpreted on its own terms. Methodical but never detached, his sentences carry urgency – not just about cinema but about cultural sovereignty, authorship and time.

Vieyra acted as an emissary for African cinema on the global stage. Sitting on festival juries and representing filmmakers in conversations that often excluded them, he helped shape the conditions for African cinema to be seen and valued as a tradition with its own aesthetics, concerns and history. Moving fluidly between languages and settings, Vieyra’s vision bridged French film institutions and Senegal’s evolving political and artistic circles.

Yet despite this breadth of activity, Vieyra’s name remains less widely known than those of the filmmakers he supported. His films – many of them short documentaries – are difficult to access. Even Africa on the Seine, frequently cited as a milestone, is rarely shown. His only feature-length fiction film, En résidence surveillée (1981), remains largely unseen outside archives. While the work of Sembène, Mambéty and others has been restored, reissued and streamed widely, Vieyra’s contributions risk being remembered only in footnotes. There is a quiet irony here: the man who made visibility possible remains, himself, barely visible.

That gap is now being actively addressed. In 2020, African Film Festival, Inc released a limited-edition boxset collecting several of his works with English subtitles (a valuable, if still too niche, resource). In 2021, his personal papers and film prints were donated to the Black Film Center & Archive at Indiana University, enabling deeper research and preservation. In May 2022, a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art reintroduced audiences to his deft handling of form and tone. And in 2025, a major international centenary campaign – coordinated by PSV-Films, rights holders to his body of work – is restoring and circulating a curated selection of his shorts and features, including En résidence sur veillée, Africa on the Seine and A Nation Is Born. In collaboration with Indiana University and with the support of Fespaco, La Fémis, CNC, OIF and others, panels and screenings are being organised across continents to reintroduce Vieyra’s works to a new generation. The centenary of his birth is a chance to re-engage with his vision of a cinema that is self-determined, pan-African and critically aware of its place in the world.

Vieyra should be remembered not only for a pioneering short, but as one of the founding minds of African cinema – a filmmaker of ideas, a historian of his moment and a facilitator whose legacy shaped how others could work. His was a cinema of quiet construction. Not every story gets the marquee – but some were instrumental in building the frame that holds it.