“I have a voice that doesn’t carry very well,” says French film-maker Alice Diop, when I tell her I can’t quite hear what she’s saying. We meet in a cafe near her home in the working-class district of Montreuil, on the eastern edge of Paris. It is busy with lunch parties, and the combination of Diop’s French – she speaks fast and quietly – with the occasional crashes of crockery isn’t ideal for discussing the complex, challenging new film she has made.
Still, if Diop’s speech doesn’t carry acoustically, it’s a different matter with her artistic voice. After a significant career as a documentary-maker, Diop’s feature film debut, Saint Omer, is resonating worldwide. It won two awards at the Venice film festival last year and was France’s entry for the best international feature at the Academy Awards, making Diop the first black woman ever to represent France in the Oscar race. Diop is suddenly in the spotlight in a way she never imagined.
“I feel ambivalent about it,” she says. “For 15 years, I’ve been making films from the margins, with a political intention of filming those margins – the banlieue, people who have been silenced, because those are the people I come from. That’s my territory, my history.
“I make cinema because I have certain obsessions – not to be visible, but because I need to. I’m constantly questioning this new position I’m in.” Indeed, this Sorbonne graduate with a masters in visual sociology comes across as a seriously analytical film-maker.
Technically, Saint Omer could be classified as a courtroom drama, but hardly in the traditional sense. Rather than offering manipulated, melodramatic reversals, this intense, stately work has the ring of classical tragedy – closer to Racine than 12 Angry Men.
Named after the northern French town where it is set, Saint Omer is inspired by the 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, a young woman originally from Senegal, charged with killing her baby daughter by leaving her on a beach. Diop attended the trial, fascinated after reading about Kabou. “I went there under the magnetic pull of an obsession that for a long time I couldn’t put into words. There was this psychoanalytic and mythical dimension underlying the way she explained her actions. She said: ‘I laid her on the sand, thinking the sea would carry her body away.’ Somehow that put the horror of the crime to one side: I was hearing something else. I found myself making up a story more beautiful, perhaps more acceptable than the real one, about a woman offering her child to a sea which could care for her.”
Like Saint Omer’s protagonist, writer and lecturer Rama, Diop attended the trial “wanting to think about uncomfortable questions that couldn’t easily be formulated. I never intended to make a film. It was only later that I realised I needed to make it.”
The script – which Diop wrote with her regular collaborator and editor Amrita David and the Goncourt-winning novelist Marie NDiaye – directly uses the words that were spoken in court, which Diop would write down from memory after each session. At the forefront are extraordinary performances by two leads from unconventional backgrounds: as Rama, Swiss actor Kayije Kagame, who usually works in experimental theatre and performance; and as the defendant Laurence, Guslagie Malanda, a visual arts curator who made a considerable impression in her one previous feature, the 2014 Doris Lessing adaptation My Friend Victoria. Her Laurence delivers her testimony in impassive, uninflected tones, in exceptionally long takes in which Malanda barely moves, a severe directorial approach on Diop’s part, bringing all the more electricity to a film with artistic nerves of steel.
“I didn’t want Guslagie to imitate Fabienne,” says Diop. “She takes Laurence in a more human, tragic direction – she’s much more empathic than the real Fabienne Kabou, who stayed extremely cold throughout the trial.” The performances are all the more striking in that Diop had never previously directed actors. As Malanda tells me later, Diop wasn’t after conventional expressive acting. “She wanted it to be absolutely unspectacular, with a sort of formal reserve. I had to show emotion without showing it.”
In common with both Rama and Laurence, Diop’s family background is Senegalese. She grew up on an estate in the north Paris banlieue of Aulnay-sous-Bois, with three sisters and a brother. Her parents arrived in France in the 60s, her father working as an industrial painter, her mother as a cleaner; for the record, her family is unrelated to the revered Senegalese auteur Djibril Diop Mambéty and his rising star niece, actor-director Mati Diop.
* * *
Diop came to film after university. She studied the history of colonial Africa at the Sorbonne, then she took a masters in visual sociology, which led her to cinema and Paris’s La Fémis film school. Among the film-makers she admires are Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, Agnès Varda, American documentary veteran Frederick Wiseman and the dauntingly sombre Portuguese director Pedro Costa. But rather than cinema, she says, her real passion has always been literature, ever since being thunderstruck by Jane Eyre at the age of 14: “I was very shy, very introverted, and literature helped me build my own universe.” It’s reading that keeps her going, she says: “I need to have the time to read.”
Diop says of her cultural makeup, “I’m very European – I’m very, very French.” But accompanying that is a sense of distance from her family background. She doesn’t speak Wolof or Serer, her parents’ languages. “Losing out on the mother tongue is probably why I have this obsessive relationship with French – I’m anchoring myself to the only language I speak.” Diop didn’t visit Senegal until she was 18, the year after her mother died: “It was quite a brutal experience, because I realised I didn’t fully belong, either here or there. It took me time to find a way of living with that country.” Today, she returns to Senegal regularly; she and her sisters have a house there, in a village on the coast.
Among Diop’s documentaries, one of the most incisive is Towards Tenderness, a troubling, empathic inquiry into the tough-nut roles adopted by many young black and Arab banlieue dwellers, inspired by the young men Diop knew as a teenager. “I was never fooled by that hyper-aggressive masculinity, which completely contradicts the way they’d like to be within the intimacy of a couple. I wanted to see how that monster was constructed – to try to reinvent the way they’re seen, and see themselves.”
Then there is Nous (We), a panoramic documentary portrait of the Paris suburbs and its residents, from a Malian car mechanic to an aristocratic hunting party in Fontainebleau, which won an award in Berlin in 2021. “It’s the film I had the most pleasure making. I saw it as a short story collection, and the inspiration was James Joyce’s Dubliners.”
Now that she has become an international name, Diop is only too aware of the kind of expectations surrounding her. “Being a spokesperson would be much too lonely. I can’t speak for all black French women, I can only speak for myself.” She’s interested, she says, in “the extreme complexity of négritude” – a term for black identity associated with the writer Aimé Césaire – while visits to the US have made her aware of differences between European and American modes of blackness. She points out that the black women she has met in universities such as Columbia have been middle-class, as opposed to her own background. “That’s one of the great things about France, the Republican idea of meritocracy – that you can be the daughter of a cleaner and attend the Sorbonne.” But she worries that that tradition may be endangered in France, and that her own son, now 14, won’t have the same opportunities that she had.
Diop fiercely protects her cultural boundaries: she doesn’t watch TV or use social media. “I’m too neurotic,” she laughs, “too easily upset. The way I think, the way I understand what I think and read, just isn’t compatible with the speed of today. It’s not a political principle – I’m just too sensitive, I need to keep my distance.”
As an artist, says actor Guslagie Malanda, Diop is “a radical film-maker, in the sense that she goes to the roots of things. She’s totally rigorous.” Yet much as Diop sees herself as an outsider, she has embraced her profile on the festival and awards circuit. Her vivid fashion sense has won her a social media fanbase and she’s happy to play the role of star auteur. “I take it as something political, a visibility thing – a black woman on the red carpet. How I look, what I say, what my body says – it’s all connected.”
Saint Omer is released in cinemas in the UK on 3 February
