Rama appears to be far more happily assimilated into French life, but as she observes the trial she grows increasingly unsettled, seeing echoes of her own life. She claims not to understand her own behavior, even suggesting that she might’ve been influenced by sorcery. But her version of events never fully adds up. Meanwhile,the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney mount pressure on Coly to tell her story in a way that makes sense. Still, Luc allowed Coly to attend his daughter’s wedding and he helped her out after he impregnated her. Married to another woman at the time, he refused to publicly acknowledge their relationship. Judging from his testimony in court, Luc could barely tolerate her presence. Coly dropped out of college, where she had studied philosophy (studying Wittgenstein), and embarked on a relationship with a much older white man, Luc (Xavier Daly). She spends each day at the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a young woman who immigrated to France from Senegal at the age of eight. The narrative was also shot in sequence, so the actors lived out the trial’s structure of events.ĭiop also created a fictionalized alter ego, history professor Rama (Kayije Kagame). She shot the film with long takes based on the trial’s transcripts. When there, she ordered a set to be built in the actual courthouse where Kabou had gone on trial. She decided to travel to the French town of Saint-Omer to attend her trial. In Le Monde, Diop saw a surveillance camera photo of Kabou at Paris’ Gare du Nord. It was inspired by Diop’s real-life fascination with the case of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese immigrant who killed her 15-month-old daughter by leaving her to drown on a beach. Diop tells a story of cultural differences – not only between minorities and the majority society, but also within the diaspora.Saint Omer, the French director Alice Diop’s feature film debut, reinforces her assertion that “all my films exist at the frontier where the two meet.” (The five documentaries which built her reputation on the international festival circuit - Danton’s Death, Towards Tenderness, On Call, RER B, We – are now streaming on MUBI.) From one perspective, Saint Omer could be classified as a true crime narrative. Rama is pregnant, but that’s not the only reason the woman’s story triggers doubts in her about her own self-image. However, the film turns out to be even more complex due to the fact that there is an outside perspective to boot: Rama, a young novelist working on the ancient Medea myth, is attending the trial. This choice of staging already creates a sort of defamiliarization that makes clear attributions and simple answers difficult. On the one hand, Diop follows this woman’s trial in an emphatically sober tone, with the accused presenting herself neither as a victim of circumstances nor as a conscienceless perpetrator. The starting point is a fait divers about a young woman from Senegal who abandoned her 15-month-old baby to the tide on a beach in northern France. SAINT OMER, her first work of fiction, is co- written with acclaimed author Marie Ndiaye and continues this project within the framework of a cleverly mirrored courtroom drama – creating one of the most astonishing fiction debuts of the year. French director Alice Diop has explored intrafamilial fractures in Afro-European families in a series of notable documentaries, most recently NOUS (2021).
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