Documentary maker Alice Diop delivers a piercing fiction feature in the form of a courtroom drama, based on a real-life case: mysterious, tragic and intimately unnerving. The severity and poise of this calmly paced movie, its emotional reserve and moral seriousness – and the elusive, implied confessional dimension concerning Diop herself – make it an extraordinary experience.
Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a bestselling author and academic who lives in Paris and is heading to the town of Saint Omer, near Calais, to write what her publishers hope will be some commercially delicious literary reportage about a shocking criminal case. Laurence Coly (superbly played by Guslagie Malanda) is a woman on trial for murdering her 15-month-old daughter, by leaving her on the beach to be drowned by the incoming tide.
