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Join Telegram ChannelA look back at the director’s faultless journey.
Saint Omer triumphed at the Venice Film Festivalthen was celebrated until the Césars, in 2022/2023. Broadcast since this week on Arte.TV, First I highly recommend this trial film, a striking portrait of a female infanticide.
Alice Diop signed her first fiction here, but she had already amazed moviegoers thanks to her very strong documentaries, recounting slices of life in France and Senegal since 2007. The director was then on the cover of issue 534 of First (November 2022), developing in our pages the secrets of its committed cinema.
If his work is increasingly noticed by film buffs, it remains too little known to the general public, even though it fully deserves to be seen. The proof by six.
Saint Omer: a trial film as relentless as it is impressive [critique]
THE SENEGALESE AND THE SENEGALOISE (2007)
Alice Diop was born in France, her mother in Senegal. The filmmaker went to her mother's homeland for a month to film women in their daily lives. If the children move freely within the frame, the men are absent. It is a question here of wounds, of hope, of looking elsewhere. “I measure from here what exile transforms, everything we lose by leaving, everything we gain”explained the director.
THE DEATH OF DANTON (2011)
Steve comes from the suburbs, has black skin and takes theater classes in Paris: “Sometimes I don’t feel like I belong!” » And in fact, the teachers can't find what to make him play. At least not Danton. Alice Diop films this colossus with feet of clay and a (too) tender heart. It is off stage, in front of the filmmaker's camera, that Steve can be Danton: “We have broken the tyranny of privilege (…) put an end to the monopoly of birth…”
Venice, Cate Blanchett and the Oscars: Alice Diop speaks before the release of Saint Omer
PERMANENCE (2016)
The last shot of this documentary shows a completely empty waiting room at the Avicenne hospital in Bobigny which welcomes new arrivals without an appointment. This plan contrasts with all the others, populated and cramped. Patients and doctors follow one another in the consultation room. Fields, reverse shots. There is certainly Raymond Depardon in the way Diop questions a society by forcing the doors of an intimacy finally revealed.
TOWARDS TENDERNESS (2016) Four boys from Seine-Saint-Denis talk about their thwarted relationship with love. Alice Diop wins the César for best short film and dedicates her prize to young victims of racist crimes by the French police. Towards tenderness unites faces and words through sensitive and enlightening editing. The camera thus captures close-ups of young mute boys in periods of waiting or transition, while off-screen, their voices deliver thoughts in motion.
Guslagie Malanda: “La Bardot de La Vérité helped me for Saint Omer”
WE (2021)
Us is the story of a crossing, the one that follows RER line B in Île-de-France. Through disparate encounters, we move from working-class neighborhoods to a more middle-class population. Worlds which never collide, but which have the right to the same attention. THE ” We “ hypothetical of a finally plural French population is questioned in a succession of ” I “ and of ” they “linked by invisible lines and a tangible railway route.
SAINT OMER (2022)
With this first fiction, Alice Diop questions with new acuteness what has been working on her since her beginnings: the restitution of speech. In Saint Omerthe first words spoken by the infanticidal mother of Senegalese origin thwart all class prejudices with their preciousness. From then on, eyes converge on this inscrutable and mysterious face. All certainties are completely reconfigured.