On its surface, Saint Omer has all the elements of a gripping true crime drama. Coming from a documentary background, filmmaker Alice Diop retells the story of a young academic who confesses to killing her mixed-race infant by leaving the child to be subsumed by the rising tide of the sea. The woman’s unspeakable story is observed through the eyes of Rama, a novelist attending the trial. Uncovering layers of mythic revelations, Diop’s first narrative feature transcends the tropes of a courtroom drama with a nuanced character study of two French Senegalese women, shaking convictions and summoning larger questions. 2022, France, in French with English subtitles, DCP, 122 min.
Bio
Alice Diop (France, b. 1979) is a director of Senegalese descent. After studying history and visual sociology at the Sorbonne, she began her career as a documentary filmmaker. Diop’s creative documentaries about contemporary French society and marginalized communities have screened at international festivals since 2007. Her feature-length documentary WE (2021) won Best Documentary and Best Film in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. Saint Omer, Diop’s first fiction feature film, premiered at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize.
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