Marie NDiaye, co-screenwriter of Saint Omer, says: “The film was already selected for the Venice Film Festival, and at the end of the screening, there was a real ovation from the room, I was next to Tilda Swinton, who was clapping, clapping. Once back home, I receive a text message from Alice: “I’m going back to Venice…” In front of my screen, I attend the presentation of the prize for the first film, obviously very moved. And when I had stopped watching, someone calls me saying “look, Alice is back on stage”, and it’s the jury’s grand prize at the Mostra, it was crazy. »
Alice is Alice Diop, the director of Saint Omer, who tells us that she has not yet had time to digest everything that is happening, “it’s just a lot of joy”, as we catch it on the fly, between two trips, festivals, meetings in all directions, from that his film was elected by the committee of professionals to represent France at the Oscars (and has since received the Jean Vigo prize again). The “shortlist” of 15 international films will be announced at the end of December. And the American verdict will take place on March 12, 2023.
Saint-Omer, news item
Saint Omer is inspired by a news item (miscellaneous, in several ways): in 2013, a Senegalese woman abandoned her 15-month-old granddaughter at Berck Plage in the sea. This absolutely admirable film follows the unfolding of the trial, around which revolves a fiction: how Rama, a young French writer from a Senegalese family, who comes to follow the case in court for her next book, feels that of Laurence Coly (Fabienne Kabou in reality).
Both on the aesthetic level and in the way of dealing with the infanticide perpetrated by a brilliant immigrant, who came to France to study philosophy at the Sorbonne and whose destiny is about to change, this unforgettable film deeply marks those who saw it before its release on November 23. “What I get from viewers is something that goes far beyond the promotion of a film,” says Alice Diop. During the preview at Saint-Omer, a man came to tell me that the film made him think about the meaning of life. A woman tells me that she would have preferred her mother to abandon her, these reactions of sometimes overwhelming intimacy show me that this film touches on the universal, carried by a black woman. It allows us to look at each of us, to shed light on our own chasms as women, and for men also to question motherhood in an uncomfortable place, without being afraid of ambivalence. While she was still working on the script with Alice Diop and her long-term editor, Amrita David, Marie NDiaye looked at Fabienne Kabou’s gesture and infanticide, from which was born revenge is mineher latest novel: “I wouldn’t have written on this subject if I hadn’t worked on this theme for the film”, confides the writer.
Spotlight on Alice Diop
Overnight, over the awards obtained, Alice Diop, who does not have television and does not frequent social networks, is thus in full light. Yet she is a seasoned documentary filmmaker, filming, in Permanenceaccess to health care at the Avicenne hospital in Bobigny, or, in Towards tenderness, what it means for suburban youth. Lately, she signs with We the infinitely sensitive portraits of people of all ages and walks of life, from a Malian mechanic to a hunting warden, who have in common to live along the RER B line, scenes intersected with personal images of his Senegalese family emigrated to France. Born 43 years ago to a worker father and a cleaner mother living in Aulnay-sous-Bois, Seine-Saint-Denis, this literature lover and avid reader (notably of Pierre Bergounioux, who quotes her in these Notebooks) hesitates after his baccalaureate between studying literature and history, in a family that includes a nurse, a documentary filmmaker and a computer engineer.
“I chose history so that literature remains a pleasure, and not an object of study. I hesitated because I’m obsessed with the accuracy of the language, I always have the impression that this desired precision escapes me. The fact of having been the fruit of a long confiscated story and word makes me realize the importance of this precision. The raw material of Saint Omerit is the language of Fabienne Kabou [les phrases prononcées par la formidable comédienne sont exactement celles du procès, NDLR]. I share with her this resistance to assignation, to what people project onto a black woman, who is surprised, for example, “that she speaks French so well”. I have often been confronted with this kind of reaction. Why qualify the fact that a black woman is soaked in literature and crossed by great texts? But failing to access this desire for precision, to invent a language to say the unformulated, I became a filmmaker and that’s very good, because I would never have been a great writer! »
She specializes in colonial history, and rode, at La Fémis, the language that will be hers. There she meets Amrita David, who will be the editor of all her films, a friendship based not on activism, specifies the latter, but “rather in a way of seeing the world, daily gestures, reactions to current events, while remaining fiercely free”. When her journey as a director began, Alice Diop endeavored to shed light on a colonial history which, she says, “continues in my life, as a Frenchwoman, to shape my interactions with the world. Today, brilliant historians work on this subject, postcolonial studies remain controversial but exist. The cinema makes it possible to invent a sensitive language, more shareable, without complaint. To illuminate reality. ” And Amrita David to emphasize: “It is the emotion that prevailed in this first work of fiction for Alice, and me, where she filmed the actors seeking accuracy as we find in the documentary, d Moreover they were chosen, each one, very much for the person, the human being that they are above all else. And all of them are absolutely remarkable.
Mothers, exile, daughters
In Saint Omer, the tragedy of Medea is embodied by an immigrant. The film reveals her story, but also that of Rama, the writer fascinated by this act and by the course of the accused. As was Alice Diop, who also followed the trial, after seeing the image of this woman in The world. But the comparison stops there, even if his very rich film on mother-daughter relationships suggests the biographical foundation. “It is these mothers crossed by the question of exile, of migration, which shape the French women that we are”, says the one who has already sought in Weto fill in the story that his mother had not passed on to him.
We, here is a pronoun that could be the keyword of his work, for which the intimate is political: “What interests me is to make known this history of immigration that it seems to me collectively important to to approach intimately. »
Universal Questions
The fact that through these black women, and their relationships, especially that of the film’s writer, Rama, and his own mother, many women who are not black have been able to identify themselves is the sign of the successful bet of universality, rejoices the filmmaker again. And its co-screenwriter, Marie NDiaye, to specify: “ Saint Omer shows faces that we see too little even though they are part of France. I see it in the field of theatre, where we start from the principle that the world is white, automatically the characters are and that does not question anyone. It is not a question of claiming, but of representing reality as we see it around us. »
While waiting for the rest… and the American verdict, Alice Diop is already savoring this “tremendous power of international selections at this level”(We had already won bears in Berlin). “It’s the opportunity to decompartmentalize, to get out of the confidentiality of documentary cinema, through fiction, based on the same questions. A film anchored in a French reality, as was We, manages to go beyond it through its universal questions, which affect international criticism. “For the one whose cinema seeks “to shake certainties and imaginations”, the challenge has already been won. Easily. While waiting for the next one, which should question the place of man in all this, but we won’t know more for the moment…
Landmarks
Born in Aulnay-sous-Bois (1979)
Senegalese and the Senegalese (2007)
The Death of Danton (2011),
Permanence (2016) https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/docu-tele-arte-l-urgence-d-ouvrir-les-yeux-sur-l-exil-27-08-2016-2064152_3.php
Towards tenderness (2016), César for Best Short Film in 2017
We (2021), prize for Best Documentary at the Berlinale, prize for Best Film in the Encounters section of the festival in 2021.
Saint Omer (2022), Future Lion and Silver Lion at 79e Venice show. Prix Jean Vigo.