French filmmaker Alice Diop at first didn’t understand why she felt so drawn to the true-life story of a French woman of Senegalese origin on trial for the drowning death of her daughter.
“I was obsessed by this case for a very long time without knowing exactly,” Diop says through a translator on a recent video call. “In fact, it was a sentence that I read in a newspaper that caught my attention.
“I read that when she was asked why she did this terrible gesture she said that she did not understand why she did it,” Diop says. “But that she lay her daughter, her young daughter on the sand because she wanted the ocean, the sea, to take her away with the rising tide.
