Alice Diop
“Saint Omer”
Some directors make the transition from docu to fiction filmmaking, but Diop doesn’t draw hard lines between the two.
“I think I will always make films at the intersection of the two forms,” says the French director, who studied anthropology and history at the university before specializing in “visual sociology.”
“Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman were both filmmakers who didn’t give up their documentary work when they made fiction films, and that’s what I love about them. ‘Vagabond’ is such an important film for me, and it has that mix.”
Diop’s third docu We won the semi-experimental Encounters section at the 2021 Berlinale.
Her subsequent narrative debut, Saint Omer is a courtroom drama based on the case of Fabienne Kabou, a French woman of Senegalese descent charged with the drowning death of her 15-month-old daughter.
The film has been shortlisted for this year’s best international feature Oscar.
For Saint Omer, Diop says, “Fiction was the best form to say specifically what I wanted to say, which I couldn’t have done if I had made a documentary about the real accused person.”
Instead, she invented a character, novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame), who observes the trial and shares much of the personal experience Diop revealed in “We”: “By approaching it from the perspective of a Senegalese woman roughly the same age as Fabienne Kabou … it’s configured to situate who is looking and to specify the issues that are central to the film: questions of Blackness, exile and motherhood.”
Diop has prioritized immigrant stories, working to expand the range of representation on film: “I’m putting at the center all those bodies that have been marginalized in so-called legitimate narratives,” she says. “It’s a question of the missing stories, of all those who haven’t been given the right to speak — as a woman, as a Black woman, as a descendant of colonialism. This is a huge territory to investigate and open up.”
