I had to show emotion without showing it.” I was very shy, very introverted, and literature helped me build my own universe “She wanted it to be absolutely unspectacular, with a sort of formal reserve. As Malanda tells me later, Diop wasn’t after conventional expressive acting. “She takes Laurence in a more human, tragic direction – she’s much more empathic than the real Fabienne Kabou, who stayed extremely cold throughout the trial.” The performances are all the more striking in that Diop had never previously directed actors. “I didn’t want Guslagie to imitate Fabienne,” says Diop. Her Laurence delivers her testimony in impassive, uninflected tones, in exceptionally long takes in which Malanda barely moves, a severe directorial approach on Diop’s part, bringing all the more electricity to a film with artistic nerves of steel. At the forefront are extraordinary performances by two leads from unconventional backgrounds: as Rama, Swiss actor Kayije Kagame, who usually works in experimental theatre and performance and as the defendant Laurence, Guslagie Malanda, a visual arts curator who made a considerable impression in her one previous feature, the 2014 Doris Lessing adaptation My Friend Victoria. The script – which Diop wrote with her regular collaborator and editor Amrita David and the Goncourt-winning novelist Marie NDiaye – directly uses the words that were spoken in court, which Diop would write down from memory after each session. It was only later that I realised I needed to make it.” Like Saint Omer’s protagonist, writer and lecturer Rama, Diop attended the trial “wanting to think about uncomfortable questions that couldn’t easily be formulated. I found myself making up a story more beautiful, perhaps more acceptable than the real one, about a woman offering her child to a sea which could care for her.” She said: ‘I laid her on the sand, thinking the sea would carry her body away.’ Somehow that put the horror of the crime to one side: I was hearing something else. There was this psychoanalytic and mythical dimension underlying the way she explained her actions. “I went there under the magnetic pull of an obsession that for a long time I couldn’t put into words. Diop attended the trial, fascinated after reading about Kabou. Named after the northern French town where it is set, Saint Omer is inspired by the 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, a young woman originally from Senegal, charged with killing her baby daughter by leaving her on a beach. Rather than offering manipulated, melodramatic reversals, this intense, stately work has the ring of classical tragedy – closer to Racine than 12 Angry Men. Technically, Saint Omer could be classified as a courtroom drama, but hardly in the traditional sense. I can’t speak for all black French women, I can only speak for myself I’m constantly questioning this new position I’m in.” Indeed, this Sorbonne graduate with a masters in visual sociology comes across as a seriously analytical film-maker. “I make cinema because I have certain obsessions – not to be visible, but because I need to. More info at this website: superltd.Kayije Kagame, left, in Saint Omer. ![]() Part of our New Visions, New Voices series.Ĭosponsored by the Institute for African Development at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. ![]() Winner of the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. ![]() Though intending to use the trial as inspiration for her next novel-an adaptation of the myth of Medea-Rama increasingly finds herself identifying with the defendant and questioning her own capacity for motherhood, her identity as a Senegalese woman in France, and her relationship with her mother. In this debut narrative feature from acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alice Diop, Rama, a literature professor and writer, travels from Paris to Saint Omer to attend the high-profile murder trial of Laurence Coly, a young Senegalese immigrant woman who is accused of leaving her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to drown.
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