[1] She was the first Sub-Saharan African woman to direct a commercially distributed feature film, Kaddu Beykat, which was released in 1975.

"[7]Almost all of Safi Faye's films (both documentary and fictive) focus heavily on the role and struggles of women in rural Africa.

"[8] Faye's directorial debut, in which she also acted, was a 1972 short called La Passante (The Passerby), drawn from her experiences as a foreign woman in Paris.

[12] Selbé regularly converses with Faye, who remains off-screen, and describes her relationship with her husband and daily life in the village.

[2] Released in 1975, it was the first feature film to be made by a Sub-Saharan African woman to be commercially distributed and gained international recognition for Faye.

[15] In 1976 it won the FIPRESCI Prize from the International Federation of Film Critics (tied with Chhatrabhang) and the OCIC Award.

It is a kind of beauty which is inaccessible to human beings.” [18] Regarding the goal of the film the director has gone on to state "there is no moral to the story;" rather, it exists "to show how tradition and modernity currently confront each other in African reality.

[17] On this, filmmaker Beti Ellerson states "Faye's capacity to intermingle fact and fiction, ethnography and mythology is born out of her desire to visualize the history and experiences of her people.

"[17] Faye employed many cinéma-vérité techniques throughout the production, particularly in casting many of the community members of the village in which the Mossane was filmed.