The Woman with the Knife

Equal parts symbolist psychodrama and shamanic ghost story, The Woman with the Knife delivers a surreal investigation of fractured identity. The sole feature by trailblazing Ivorian filmmaker Timité Bassori stars the writer-director himself as a bourgeois intellectual whose life is thrown into turmoil after he experiences a disturbing vision of a mysterious, knife-wielding woman—the beginning of a crisis that forces him to confront his deep-seated sexual repression and social alienation. Capturing the streetscapes of 1960s Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in New Wave–cool black and white, and set to a dreamy mix of American jazz and West African pop, this touchstone work of African cinema is a daring and complex journey into the postcolonial unconscious.

The Woman with the Knife was restored in 2019 by the Cineteca di Bologna and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, at L'Immagine Ritrovata. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers, and UNESCO, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema. Funding was provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.