Acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop celebrates her debut feature film with “Saint Omer,” a legal drama that made headlines and won the Grand Jury Prize and Best Film Award for its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. High-profile slots are coming up in Toronto, New York and London – making the French title one of the true achievements of this fall season.
The haunting film follows Rama (Kaiji Kagami), a young novelist who covers the trial of an immigrant mother accused of infanticide. With key elements she never suspects—the accused, Lawrence (Guslaji Malanda), admitting the act, though she still pleads not guilty—the winner of the gun turns around on more intimate, philosophical, and troubling questions.
Like Rama in the movie, she attended the real trial on which “Saint Omar” is based. Did you do that with this project in mind?
I’m still trying to understand what prompted me. Originally, I attended the trial out of intuition. Something pulled me to this state, I just couldn’t say what. I think I needed to see the woman behind the media storm.
Throughout the trial, I sat dazed, shocked, confused, perturbed and stunned by this woman’s true story, relating her life to my own experience, to that of my mother, to the lives of so many Senegalese women I know. When I saw, on the last day, every other woman in the courtroom crying too, I realized we had shared something indescribably deep, which made the story universal. Only then did I decide to make this movie.
What prompted you to develop it as a narrative feature?
A documentary was never the plan. At the time, I was too busy researching, plus we couldn’t shoot in the courtroom and never would. [make the real participants] Re-enactment of actions. Anyway, I wanted to rebuild Mine The experience of listening to another woman’s story while questioning myself, and facing my hard truths. The narrative had to trace a series of emotional states that could lead to catharsis. It’s like accelerated psychotherapy.
Was it difficult to create a sense of connection between two characters who did not interact once?
This was our biggest creative challenge. On the stage, Lawrence is forced to speak against her will, but somehow the words give voice to Rama’s inner monologue. Without making the parallels very clear, Lawrence’s words caught on Rama, resulting in a torrent of feelings, nightmares, and fears that we intentionally leave vague. The physical performances of the actors were key here; We needed to see a woman’s words take shape on another’s body.
The film offers no answer as to what drove Lawrence to such extremes.
In the end, the goal was not to understand the motive but to think about the action. How does it affect us? What do you say about our relationship with our families?
For me, tragedy means exposing the stories, vulgar and unfamiliar, that go deep into us. If that’s what makes this issue universal, the fact that it bears on the body of a black woman also makes the film political. Lawrence’s character encourages all viewers, men or women, white or black, to look inside themselves.
On screen and behind the camera, I assembled a female cast and crew. Was this a major option?
If that wasn’t entirely intentional, it wasn’t entirely accidental. The film explores our relationships with our mothers and children. In retrospect, I think I needed to share that collective experience within a community of women. On the set, everyone participated in that drama. There was little distance between the cast and crew, between fantasy and reality. The mostly women team made this even more acute. We lived together six weeks of production as if in trance; We were all haunted by this text.
[ad_2]
