Abdoulaye Ascofare

Abdoulaye Ascofaré (born April 20, 1949) is a Malian poet and filmmaker. Ascofaré was born in Gao, Mali in 1949 and was a radio host until 1978, when he became a teacher at the Institut National des Arts in Bamako. In 1984, he received a diploma in film studies from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (now the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography) in Moscow and, in 1985, he joined the Centre National de Production Cinématographique in Bamako as a director.

Beginning in 1991, he produced several short films and, in 1997, he produced his first full-length film, Faraw, une mère des sables (Faraw, a mother of the sands), which retraces twenty-four hours in the life of a Songhaï woman. Faraw won the Golden Bayard for Artistic Creation at the 1997 Namur Film festival.

As a poet, he has published Domestiquer le rêve (Domesticating the Dream).