#Alice Diop

[stellacadente]

SAINT OMER (2022) dir. Alice Diop

[maggiecheungs]

“I dreamed of becoming a great philosopher. My ambition was cut short.”

SAINT OMER (2022) dir. Alice Diop

[cinematicmasterpiece]

saint omer (2022)

[sundaynightfilms]

Saint Omer, 2022

[folditdouble]

Women in Film Challenge 2023: [33/52] Saint Omer, dir. Alice Diop (France, 2023)

We women, we are all chimeras. We carry within us the traces of our mothers and of our daughters, who in turn will carry ours. It is a never-ending chain. In a way, us women, we are all monsters; but we are terribly human monsters.

[ennaih]

Every Film I Watch In 2023:

72. Saint Omer (2022)

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Vers la tendresse (Alice Diop, 2016)

[sesiondemadrugada]

Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022).

[filmap]

Saint Omer Alice Diop. 2022

Courthouse 3 Rue des Tribunaux, 62503 Saint-Omer, Francia See in map

See in imdb

[theinsatiables]

AP: Why do you think you were compelled to go to the trial [of Fabienne Kabou, who one night in 2013 left her 15-month-old daughter on the beach to die]?

DIOP: I went to the trial because I had a very strong intuition. But for a very long time, I didn’t know what it was about. I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I’m going to go to the trial and make a film about it.’ I think as a woman, as actually many other women around me, I was completely fascinated by this story. I really went as a woman. What struck me was a sentence that the defendant said to the police. When the inspector asked, ‘Why did you kill your daughter?’ she said, ‘I laid my daughter on the sand because I wanted the sea to take her away.’ For the French, it carries a very profound, psychoanalytic dimension because in French, the mother and the sea are the same word (mère and mer). In my head, I had the fantasy that she offered her daughter to a mother that was more powerful than she felt. It is this imagery of this mythological concept that became a magnet for me. But during the five days that I listened to this trial, I had no idea that it was going to draw me to the deepest, darkest place of my being.

AP: Having a child myself viscerally changed how I processed movies and stories about children in distress. Did you have an experience like that too, as a mother thinking about a story like this?

DIOP: I can’t exactly say that. But it is true that my partner was very concerned by my obsession with this story. Even for me it was a complete mystery. I did not understand why me, as a Black woman, could be so fascinated by this story of a Black woman that had killed her child. That was incomprehensible to me. I’m going to tell you something very personal, which I never talk about. I actually had a very deep postpartum depression when my child was a baby. And I believe that this trial is what helped me heal out of that depression. I not only forgave myself, but I also forgave my mother. It’s as if this trial was helping me, killing all this trauma.

[forhandsthatsuffer]

Saint Omer (2022), dir. Alice Diop

[maggiecheungs]

Members of the jury, this is the story of a phantom woman. Of a slow disappearance. A tragic descent into hell.

Guslagie Malanga as Laurence Coly in SAINT OMER (2022) dir. Alice Diop

[oldfilmsflicker]

Saint Omer, 2022 (dir. Alice Diop)

[moratoirenoir]

[pentosesuga]

Saint-Omer (2022) Dir. Alice Diop

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