Exclusive: After clinching the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2019 with her debut fiction feature Atlantics, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop had one burning desire.
“My dream was to set up a film school in Dakar,” she tells Deadline.
Diop made history that year in Cannes as the first Black woman to compete in the festival’s official competition. She clocked a similar milestone in February when she became the first Black filmmaker to win Berlin’s Golden Bear with the inventive documentary Dahomey.
Borrowing its name from the ancient West African kingdom of Dahomey, located in the south of today’s Republic of Benin, the doc opens in November 2021 as twenty-six royal treasures from the former Kingdom are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin. Along with thousands of others, the artifacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892.
Dahomey is Diop’s second feature project and the first from Fanta Sy,...
“My dream was to set up a film school in Dakar,” she tells Deadline.
Diop made history that year in Cannes as the first Black woman to compete in the festival’s official competition. She clocked a similar milestone in February when she became the first Black filmmaker to win Berlin’s Golden Bear with the inventive documentary Dahomey.
Borrowing its name from the ancient West African kingdom of Dahomey, located in the south of today’s Republic of Benin, the doc opens in November 2021 as twenty-six royal treasures from the former Kingdom are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin. Along with thousands of others, the artifacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892.
Dahomey is Diop’s second feature project and the first from Fanta Sy,...
- 5/9/2024
- by Zac Ntim
- Deadline Film + TV
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer brings the French filmmaker into the realm of fiction for the first time, but preserves her documentary respect for the evidence of the audience’s eyes. A sober, pared-down courtroom drama, Saint Omer initially makes little effort to comment on its action, at times feeling more like presentation than representation. The unadorned quality of the film can be laborious, particularly in the early stretches of the trial that’s at the center of the story, but Diop earns the effort she asks of her audience, methodically allowing a strange, intangible, but nevertheless palpable mix of emotions to emerge from the situation itself.
It’s certainly a choice, and the expression of an ethos, that Diop keeps the viewer locked in to repeating pairs of alternating camera angles for significant portions of the trial. We see the defendant, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant and...
It’s certainly a choice, and the expression of an ethos, that Diop keeps the viewer locked in to repeating pairs of alternating camera angles for significant portions of the trial. We see the defendant, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant and...
- 3/25/2024
- by Pat Brown
- Slant Magazine
Alice Diop’s Saint Omer is a movie about a trial. But it is not strictly concerned with the question of innocence or guilt as a problem of the law. Far more complex, the movie finds, is the problem of how we should feel about the moral authority of the question — and the moral authority of the domain in which it can be asked. It is a movie about language and testimony, mothers and daughters, and the specific burden of a Black immigrant woman who finds herself subjected to the French legal gaze.
- 1/14/2023
- by K. Austin Collins
- Rollingstone.com
One of the finest films of 2022 is the narrative debut of documentarian Alice Diop, Saint Omer. Selected as France’s Oscar entry, the multiple Venice award winner is inspired by Diop’s real-life experience of attending trial of Senegalese mother Fabienne Kabou, who walked to the beach in Berck-Sur-Mar and left her 15-month-old daughter to get swept away by the ocean. We caught up with the filmmaker to discuss the searing courtroom drama at New York Film Festival and now ahead of a January 2023 release, the new U.S. trailer has arrived.
Jake Kring-Schreifels said in his NYFF review, “Saint Omer isn’t a movie concerned specifically with a verdict. It asks you to listen, to observe and consider a tragedy and its ripples within a community. Near the end of the trial Coly’s barrister makes an impassioned closing statement appealing to the undying biological connection a mother shares with her child,...
Jake Kring-Schreifels said in his NYFF review, “Saint Omer isn’t a movie concerned specifically with a verdict. It asks you to listen, to observe and consider a tragedy and its ripples within a community. Near the end of the trial Coly’s barrister makes an impassioned closing statement appealing to the undying biological connection a mother shares with her child,...
- 12/6/2022
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
In 2016, documentary filmmaker Alice Diop (We) felt compelled to attend the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese mother accused of infanticide. Pregnant at the time, Diop followed and read about the details of the three-year-old case wherein Kabou had taken her 15-month-old child to the beach in Berck-Sur-Mer and left her to be claimed by rising tides. As Diop watched testimony of Kabou’s unthinkable crime, she began wrestling with her own feelings—about immigrants, about prejudice, about her mother, about her own impending motherhood, and about the chemical bonds of that deeply rooted relationship. Soon a movie was born.
In Saint Omer, Diop has created a fictionalized version of that trial, centering her debut narrative feature through the eyes of her alter-ego Rama (Kayije Kagame), a journalist, professor and expectant mother living in Paris. Authoring a book inspired by the Medea myth, Rama decides to visit the eponymous town...
In Saint Omer, Diop has created a fictionalized version of that trial, centering her debut narrative feature through the eyes of her alter-ego Rama (Kayije Kagame), a journalist, professor and expectant mother living in Paris. Authoring a book inspired by the Medea myth, Rama decides to visit the eponymous town...
- 10/6/2022
- by Jake Kring-Schreifels
- The Film Stage
Click here to read the full article.
Neon’s boutique label Super has acquired the U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s Saint Omer after a bow at Venice.
The film picked up the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, played in Toronto and is headed to a U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. Super plans to release the film theatrically.
Diop co-wrote her debut fiction feature alongside Amrita David and Marie Ndiaye. Saint Omer stars Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville and Aurélia Petit.
The courtroom drama allowed Diop to make her first narrative feature with Saint Omer. The film follows Rama (Kagame), a pregnant young novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Malanda), a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old baby by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide.
Rama arrives in the northern French town of Saint Omer,...
Neon’s boutique label Super has acquired the U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s Saint Omer after a bow at Venice.
The film picked up the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, played in Toronto and is headed to a U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. Super plans to release the film theatrically.
Diop co-wrote her debut fiction feature alongside Amrita David and Marie Ndiaye. Saint Omer stars Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville and Aurélia Petit.
The courtroom drama allowed Diop to make her first narrative feature with Saint Omer. The film follows Rama (Kagame), a pregnant young novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Malanda), a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old baby by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide.
Rama arrives in the northern French town of Saint Omer,...
- 9/16/2022
- by Etan Vlessing
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Click here to read the full article.
[The following story contains spoilers from Saint Omer.]
Acclaimed French documentarian Alice Diop makes a strong transition to the narrative feature with Saint Omer, her first fictional film, premiering this week in the Venice Film Festival’s main competition.
The film follows Rama (Kayije Kagame), a pregnant young novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old baby by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide. Rama arrives in the northern French town of Saint Omer, where the trial will be held, with the intention of turning the tragic event into a literary retelling of Medea, but as she learns more about Coly’s life, she becomes increasingly anxious about her own memories and pregnancy.
Like her protagonist, Diop, also the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, traveled to attend a real-life trial of a Senegalese woman charged in...
[The following story contains spoilers from Saint Omer.]
Acclaimed French documentarian Alice Diop makes a strong transition to the narrative feature with Saint Omer, her first fictional film, premiering this week in the Venice Film Festival’s main competition.
The film follows Rama (Kayije Kagame), a pregnant young novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old baby by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide. Rama arrives in the northern French town of Saint Omer, where the trial will be held, with the intention of turning the tragic event into a literary retelling of Medea, but as she learns more about Coly’s life, she becomes increasingly anxious about her own memories and pregnancy.
Like her protagonist, Diop, also the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, traveled to attend a real-life trial of a Senegalese woman charged in...
- 9/7/2022
- by Patrick Brzeski
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Exclusive: Award-winning Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop (Saint Omer) has signed with CAA for representation.
Best known for her work in the documentary space, Diop makes her narrative debut with Saint Omer, which will premiere in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, subsequently going on to make its North American premiere in Toronto. The film, which Diop directed from her script written with Marie N’Diaye, follows Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly at the Saint-Omer Criminal Court. The author intends to use Coly’s story to write a modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but things don’t go as expected. Wild Bunch International is handling international sales, with CAA Media Finance representing the film’s North American rights.
Diop has often used her work as a means of exploring the relationship between society and cinema in contemporary France. The filmmaker...
Best known for her work in the documentary space, Diop makes her narrative debut with Saint Omer, which will premiere in competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, subsequently going on to make its North American premiere in Toronto. The film, which Diop directed from her script written with Marie N’Diaye, follows Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly at the Saint-Omer Criminal Court. The author intends to use Coly’s story to write a modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but things don’t go as expected. Wild Bunch International is handling international sales, with CAA Media Finance representing the film’s North American rights.
Diop has often used her work as a means of exploring the relationship between society and cinema in contemporary France. The filmmaker...
- 8/29/2022
- by Matt Grobar
- Deadline Film + TV
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