Oscar Contender Alice Diop Is Pushing the Boundaries of Global Cinema

The other day, while researching her next film, Alice Diop came upon a dark piece of her nation’s past. During a brutal period of French colonization in the 1930s, a law banned colonized people in Africa from filming themselves. Born in the suburbs of Paris to Senegalese parents, Diop has spent 20 years building a filmmaking career without ever knowing that history. That she’d finally learn of it while on the Oscar campaign trail for her award-winning new film, Saint Omer? 

“It blew my mind,” Diop tells me over Zoom from Los Angeles, through a translator. “The situation in which I’m living is a form of reparation of history. That I, a child of descendants of colonized people, am now representing France with this film—it’s a kind of irony of history, a way of repairing history.”

Saint Omer marks the first time ever, in more than 70 years of selections, that France has submitted a film directed by a Black woman to represent it in the Oscar race for best international feature. (All eligible countries can submit only a single film to contend for nominations in the category.) Having won the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize and received universal acclaim, the movie was less a surprising choice than a sadly overdue one—and a testament to Diop’s undeniable accomplishment. The director calls this “the outcome of a political struggle I’ve been fighting for 20 years,” adding, “France has selected a film where form is at heart of the project, a very demanding film from a formal perspective—and directed by a Black woman on top of that.”

A highly regarded documentarian, Diop shifted to fiction filmmaking with Saint Omer, her narrative debut. Yet its roots are deeply historic and autobiographical: The movie, an evocation of the Greek tragedy of Medea, is based on the 2016 case of Fabienne Kabou, a French woman of Senegalese origin accused of infanticide, and who admitted in court to killing her 15-month-old daughter at the beach, the tide sweeping the child up. Diop attended this trial as an observer and was left shaken by it. “Due to my position as a woman—as a Black woman—I have a very specific point of view on this story that others did not have,” she says. In writing Saint Omer, she says she worked off of actual court transcripts to recreate that sensational, tragic courtroom experience—creating the character of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) as a stand-in for Kabou, and of a pregnant young novelist named Rama (Kayije Kagame) as a stand-in for herself. (Diop shares the screenplay credit with the film’s editor, Amrita David, as well as novelist Marie Ndiaye.)

Between Laurence and Rama, Saint Omer fashions an innovative two-hander. We’re largely in one setting, and mostly listening to Laurence’s testimony. Just as important as hearing the defendant’s words—her earnest, honest attempts to explain the inexplicable—is watching the attendee process them. “Without the character of Rama, it would have been very uncomfortable for me to make the film—I think it would have been nearly immoral and sick to look at such a horrific story that way,” Diop says. “This film puts two characters in parallel. One who would prefer not to speak but is forced to speak, and another who cannot speak and who ultimately speaks to us through the reactions her body has to the other woman’s words.”

It’s a distinctive kind of cinematic language—subverting the conventions of courtroom drama for a thorny, formally innovative dual character study. Laurence essentially recites her biography before those eager to punish her. She describes her difficult upbringing and tumultuous relationship with her own mother; she achingly reflects on the isolation of life in what’s essentially single parenthood, an immigrant without many options and at the whims of people who don’t care to understand her. In encountering the darkest vision of motherhood, Rama internally examines her own impending life change.