A version of this interview with “Saint Omer” director Alice Diop first ran in the International Film issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
In 2015, French filmmaker Alice Diop attended the trial of a Senegalese woman living in France who left her 15-month-old baby girl on a beach to be swept away by the high tide. The story was tragic, horrifying. And it stirred up such complex feelings in Diop that she resolved to make it the basis of her first fiction film, following several acclaimed documentaries.
“Saint Omer” unfolds from the point of view of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a newly pregnant novelist who, much like Diop did, sits in the courthouse gallery and tries to understand what pushed Laurence (Guslagie Malanga) to commit infanticide. The film won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice (as well as best debut feature) and is France’s submission to the international Oscar category.
You based your movie on a true story that fascinated you, and you’ve said that you found something universal in the questions that it raised for you. What about the case felt universal to you?
It’s certainly very complicated. I mean, it may seem very strange to talk about universality and identification in such a terrible, difficult news story. When I talk about possible identification, it’s because when I went to the trial, what interested me was far beyond the crime and sordid news story. It was: What leads a mother to have such an ambiguous, tragic relationship with her own child? What does it mean to become a mother? What is a mother? What are we made of? How are we shaped by the mother we had, by the childhood we had? All these questions are universal questions.
When Laurence is asked in court why she killed her child, she replies, “I don’t know. But I hope this trial can teach me.” At the end of the movie, though, she is still a mystery and her crime every bit as incomprehensible. Were you drawn to the idea that truth can never be known?
It for sure fascinated me. I had never been to a criminal trial, and what fascinated me in the experience was the attempt to understand what a human soul is. In literature, writers have come close, but without, of course, ever claiming to say they know what truth is. On the other hand, what interested me in the judicial process was the attempt to tell the truth of a person by adding up purely objective facts. But that objectivity fails before the mystery that is the human soul. We are a mystery to ourselves. The goal of “Saint Omer” was not to speak the truth of this woman or even judge her. That’s why there is no verdict (shown) at the end, because each viewer is the judge and they judge her based on who they are and what emotions they’ve experienced.
You attended the real trial and for “Saint Omer,” you took a lot of things directly from the court transcript, but not everything. How did you find the right balance between fiction and the historical record?
What comes from the trial is almost the entirety of the hearings — meaning, all the dialogue and all the minutes of the real trial have become the dialogue in the film between Laurence and the (criminal court) president and the witnesses. The documentary material of the real trial fascinated me enormously, and (my co-writer and) I both collected very, very precise material. From there, we worked on the fictional framework of the film embodied by Rama, who, even though she’s inspired by something I lived, she really is a fictional character whose narrative reveals the real stakes of the film. By that I mean: This pregnant woman who goes to this trial but who at the beginning of the film seems not to invest her pregnancy at all. And what seems to move her at the trial is more an intellectual project and a literary project. And so it’s the intimate journey she takes that allows the narrative to unfold.
Speaking of Rama, the moment when Laurence smiles at her from the stand — that scene haunted me. I interpreted it as Laurence trying to make a connection with another Black woman in this sea of white faces in court. Maybe my interpretation is way off…!
What you have to say about it interests me almost more than what I could tell you because really, the film is very generous in what it asks of the viewer. I don’t make films to imprison the audience in my own point of view. I make films to be able to be in dialogue, to offer something where everyone can come and help themselves and interpret. So your interpretation is accurate because it’s yours. So it could be (Laurence) seeking a link with this woman (Rama), who is almost a mirror of herself. And it can be the opposite — meaning, this smile can say to her, “Actually, deep down, aren’t you just like me? Am I not going to drag you into my own madness, into my own abyss?” You can also see it like that. In any case, the scene is a tipping point: Rama’s identification with Laurence reaches its most dangerous point. She had to go all the way there, to that smile, to say to herself, “This woman is not me. I am not the same. I don’t want to go where she is taking me.” She is sent back to her reality to be able to be born as a mother, perhaps.
“Saint Omer” won two top awards in Venice and it is France’s Oscar entry. What does that recognition mean to you?
I have to differentiate what happened in Venice from the honor of representing France. Because Alice Diop, a Black French woman representing France with a film starring two Black actresses — that sentence is actually extremely political. It describes the ongoing political battle that I took up when I decided to make films, specifically to tell all these stories that were missing, that were not yet allowed to be told. To allow this story into that space, (told) from my position as a Black woman, and that it represents contemporary French cinema, I feel like the victory is already there, in the statement itself. So I was very, very honored.
(The original interview was conducted in French and translated into English by Missy Schwartz.)
Read more from the Race Begins issue here, and from the International issue here.
