Saint Omer – Films – Visions du Réel

Alice Diop
France | 2022 | 122 min
Language : French
Subtitle : English

Alice Diop delves into a human interest story that shook the whole of France: the trial of a Franco-Senegalese mother charged with infanticide. A dizzying mise en abyme between the defendant and the heroine, the filmmaker and her subject, revealing the complexity inherent to the experience of being born a woman. Saint Omer was awarded the Silver Lion and the Lion of the Future at the Venice International Film Festival.

Legal age: 12 years, suggested age: 14 years

In 2016, a court case shook the town of Saint Omer: a young Franco-Senegalese mother was charged with killing her 15-month-old daughter. Alice Diop delves into this human interest story, intrigued by its fascinating central character. This is the premise of Saint Omer, the director’s first fiction film. What makes this film so moving are its extraordinary story and unfathomably complex protagonist, embodied by the superb Guslagie Malanga. Diop’s formal innovation, through which much is suggested and nothing explained, contributes to a landscape of pure sensations. Shot almost exclusively behind closed doors, the controlled and analytical mise en scène creates a dizzying impression of real time. The filmmaker then proceeds to deploy an unsettling series of mises en abyme: the horror of reality and its reconstruction, the fictional being and their real-life double… but, above all, the defendant and the heroine, played by the electrifying Kayije Kagame. They could not be more different, and yet they are drawn ever closer, inexorably, as if by a magnetic force... Alice Diop challenges us, raising such questions as: What if being born a woman was in some way to harbour an inherent darkness? And is it possible to free oneself from it, in order to finally live life on one’s own terms?

Bastien Bento

Saint Omer, 2022
Nous, 2021
RER B, 2017
Vers la tendresse, 2016
La Permanence, 2016
La Mort de Danton, 2011
Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise, 2007
Clichy pour l’exemple, 2006
La Tour du monde, 2006