Banel & Adama: Ramata-Toulaye Sy on her Senegalese love story turned cautionary tale

Ramata-Toulaye Sy never wanted to be a director; her first love was always writing. “I didn’t want to direct. I stuck with screenwriting because I’ve been passionate about literature since I was young,” the filmmaker explains. “I have something with words and stories, but not images.” 

Few viewers are likely to agree with that self-assessment. Banel & Adama, Sy’s debut feature as a writer-director, is wonderfully visual, a vividly rendered love story turned cautionary tale, soaked in myth, magic and unexpected colour. Set in a small village in north Senegal, the film follows a young married couple who find their love threatened by the restrictive expectations of their community and by a life-threatening drought. In 2023, the film premiered in competition at Cannes, alongside work by veterans such as Wim Wenders, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Catherine Breillat. The reluctant first time director was catapulted immediately into a new league.

Banel & Adama is a love story with many layers. The romance between Banel (Khady Mane) and Adama (Mamadou Diallo) is the intoxicated, besotted kind. In wistful, sun-soaked early scenes, the couple walk through the sandy landscape leaning on one another and swimming ecstatically together in a nearby oasis. Their names, entwined in an earnest whisper, are a recurring feature on the soundtrack, woven into the warm winds which blow through the village. However, that devotion also attracts suspicion from other villagers, and when Banel encourages Adama to turn down the hereditary role of chief, the rejection of protocol causes a scandal. Hard-edged Banel’s refusal to subscribe to traditional feminine roles – she resents not being able to work alongside Adama with the cows – only makes matters worse. When drought follows, unleashing a wave of death, blame falls firmly on the lovers.

Banel & Adama is particularly preoccupied with the question of how an individual fits into a tight-knit community. “The love story is like the fiction I want to put around my story, but the goal of my story came with one question,” Sy explains. “How can you live with your individuality …  without rejecting the community?” For the filmmaker, that question was tightly wound up with feminist critique. The film is set in a devout Islamic community where women’s behaviour is constantly scrutinised. Rebellious Banel, who kills birds with her slingshot, wants to wear trousers and is reluctant to bear children, struggles to fit in. “She can’t find her way to live in the community as a woman,” says Sy. “She doesn’t want to be like the other; she wants to be the woman she wants to be. And it’s impossible.”

Sy herself did not grow up in this kind of community. Raised in Paris by Senegalese parents, she wrote the screenplay for Banel & Adama for her graduation project at prestigious film school La Fémis. She spent the next few years as a script doctor and writer, co-writing two features: Sibel (2018) and Our Lady of the Nile (2019). She only stepped up to the director’s chair for Banel & Adama because her producer was struggling to find a suitable director. “Four years ago, they said to me that if I wanted to see this movie on the screen one day, I would have to [direct],” says Sy. “It was a kind of sacrifice, but I think it was a good time for me; I felt mature enough to make this jump.”

It was quite the leap of faith; nothing about the production was easy. The shoot took place in a village with no electricity eight hours from Dakar, in sweltering 50 degree heat, using a cast entirely of non-professional actors. Sy wanted actors who could speak Fulani, the local language of the region, without an accent, so she held open castings in northern Senegal. The central role of Banel was the most difficult to cast; in the end, after seeing hundreds of young women, Sy found Khady Mane walking in the street one night. “I didn’t know it was her, but I had a feeling… our eyes met and I saw something in her,” remembers Sy. “I wasn’t sure that she could act, but I took the risk. It was the same with Mamadou [Diallo] who played Adama. I think with a non-professional you have to feel it in your guts, follow your guts.”

That gamble paid off. Mane is magnetic, capturing brilliantly Banel’s complex mix of strength, tenderness and infatuation. To write her sometimes difficult protagonist, Sy drew on the powerful and dangerous women of Greek tragedy, tragic heroines like Medea and Phaedra. The influence of classical Greek drama is just one of many cited by Sy, from young adult novels (she loves Harry Potter) to Toni Morrison, François Truffaut to Barry Jenkins, Shakespeare to Maya Angelou. What’s impressive, though, is that even as a debut filmmaker Sy is able to move beyond fandom, absorbing those influences and turning them into something fresh.

Another distinctive facet of Banel & Adama is the way it switches between tones, moving from idyllic, sun-kissed romance to psychological horror as the drought begins to take its toll. “For me, it was really important that the photography, the colour and the image followed the hurt of Banel,” explains Sy.  “At the beginning Banel is so in love, all the colours are very bright. And as the love is put into difficulty, the colour becomes white, grey, very different.” Here Sy drew upon visual art to find the effect she, and her cinematographer Amine Berrada, wanted to create. “My goal in this movie was to go from impressionism to expressionism. The beginning is more like Claude Monet, very peaceful, with beautiful colour. By the end, the movie is more like Van Gogh or Edvard Munch, with craziness, in light and colour.”

That shift mirrors Banel’s mental state, but it also reflects the gruelling impact of the drought, as relentless heat sucks the moisture from ground and bleaches the bones of dead cows. It was important to Sy that her film meaningfully explored the impact of the climate crisis on Senegal. Sy’s family comes from near where the film was shot, and she has seen first-hand how the area is being destroyed by climate change. “Everywhere is changing, but I think it’s more visible in Africa,” says Sy. “My mum told me that when she was young, there were two seasons, the rainy season and the normal season, both six months. But now the rainy season is just three months, and it does not rain a lot, just a few days. African people are living climate change more than other continents, but they are the least responsible for it. That is the truth.”

In Banel & Adama we see that horrifying truth played out, as drought ravishes the land, divides a community and extinguishes love. Sy’s film does not explicitly reflect on colonial legacies, but by touching upon the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis on Africa, she gestures outward towards that history of extraction and exploitation. The film places her firmly within the emerging wave of fellow French-Senegalese filmmakers – such as Mati Diop and Alice Diop – who are drawing on their dual heritage and the magical potential of cinema to make unusual, spellbinding works which explore the relationship between those two countries.

A few years before Banel & Adama screened at Cannes, Mati Diop had paved the way, when Atlantics (2019) made her the first Black woman director to screen in competition at the festival. For Sy, seeing her peers succeed has been a huge source of inspiration. “I think Mati opened the way for me. It was more difficult for her, and Alice too,” says Sy, her voice full of palpable pride. “These two incredible women and filmmakers, I love their work. I’m really happy whenever a journalist says my name alongside theirs.” With Banel & Adama, Sy has placed herself firmly in the same league as her formidable peers; expect to hear more of her name in years to come.

Banel & Adama is in cinemas from 15 March 2024.