Profile: Alice Diop

If you had met Alice Diop before she made Saint Omer, it might have been at IDFA or another documentary film festival, where she showed films like her 2011 La mort de Danton about a Black man from the Paris suburbs at war with the violence that surrounds him. Or the 2016 La permanence, which follows a doctor as he makes his rounds treating migrants in a Paris hospital. Or last year’s We, a series of encounters the director makes with ordinary people on a train crossing Paris and its suburbs from north to south.

All along the way, Diop’s documentaries won her recognition at festivals:  La mort du Danton the Libraries award at the Cinéma du Réel, La permanence the Louis Marcorelles award at the same festival, while We won the Encounters award at Berlin. But nothing prepared audiences for her dazzling switch to fiction filmmaking with one of the most talked-about films in Venice, Saint Omer. It received the Silver Lion Grand jury award, as well as the Lion of the Future, and has been chosen as France’s submission for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards.

Based on a real murder trial that took place in France — the appalling trial of a young Senegalese woman who left her infant daughter on a beach to be swept away by the tide — Diop’s film doubles the complexity of the legal proceedings and moral questions raised by framing it in the fears of a journalist attending the trial: she is scared over her own pregnancy and conflicted over her mixed-race relationship and her mother. Looking further, one can see the strings attaching the director herself to this story. She was born outside Paris to Senegalese parents (she has explored her family and early life in her films) and grew up in a housing project, later studying history and getting her degree in sociology. TFV praised the film for the way it “delves into the darker currents so nonjudgmentally” and its portrait of motherhood will remain one of the most nuanced and thought-provoking in contemporary cinema.