Alice Diop: ​‘A fic­tion­al space could reveal my point of view’

The Saint Omer press tour has been intense for Alice Diop. ​“My first inter­view was a Black jour­nal­ist who asked me just one ques­tion, then she start­ed cry­ing, and we fell apart togeth­er.” The writer/​director nods toward my typed-out ques­tions and smiles, ​“You are very, very dan­ger­ous for me.” But while she may have to endure the weight of fes­ti­val audi­ences weep­ing and jour­nal­ists’ raw emo­tions, she feels this has ulti­mate­ly achieved her goal.

“I had a con­vic­tion, and I put faith in the story’s polit­i­cal state­ment. I wrote with the inten­tion of mov­ing peo­ple, but I couldn’t antic­i­pate such inten­si­ty.” Her ele­gant but har­row­ing tale is of Rama (Kay­i­je Kagame), an aca­d­e­m­ic sit­ting in on the tri­al of a woman accused of infan­ticde. Diop’s film placed her in a vul­ner­a­ble posi­tion as it is deeply per­son­al and her protagonist’s life and sto­ry resem­bles her own. But it has received love let­ters from crit­ics, won the Sil­ver Lion and Lion of The Future award at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val and was select­ed as France’s entry to the Acad­e­my Awards.

That polit­i­cal state­ment was clear at Venice where Diop end­ed her accep­tance speech with the words, ​“Our silence will not pro­tect us”. She was quot­ing the African-Amer­i­can poet and civ­il rights activist Audre Lorde who, like Diop, saw her cre­ative tal­ent as a tool to con­front injus­tice. But a few eye­brows were raised as Diop received the Lion of The Future award, as this seemed to ignore the fact she had direct­ed sev­en doc­u­men­taries pri­or to Saint Omer. Diop her­self sees ​“no hier­ar­chy between fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary” and, giv­en the festival’s top prize was award­ed to Lau­ra Poitras’ All The Beau­ty And The Blood­shed, labelling Saint Omer Diop’s debut was all the more puzzling.

Diop’s actu­al film­mak­ing debut came in 2005 with La Tour Du Monde which saw her return to the work­ing-class neigh­bour­hood of her youth which she had left behind in order to con­front the guilt that came from that deci­sion while also shin­ing a light on the dis­en­fran­chised and the des­ti­tute. It’s ath­eme that becomes a through­line in her work, and there’s a sense that Diop is fas­ci­nat­ed by things that main­stream thinkers stu­dious­ly neglect. In 2011’s Danton’s Death Diop’s sub­ject is the bud­ding young actor Steve Tientcheu.

Like Diop, Tientcheu is from The City of 3000, a poor Parisian sub­urb. He is accept­ed into the pres­ti­gious act­ing school Le Cours Simon with dreams of star­dom on stage and screen. But togeth­er, Diop and Tientcheu dis­cov­er the ago­nis­ing cul­tur­al bar­ri­ers that lie ahead, where the the­atre world wish­es only to see him play broad stereo­types. (It’s worth not­ing that, in the decade since he said it on cam­era, Tientcheu’s dream of star­ring in films that pre­mière at ​“Cannes and Venice” has come true.) 2016’s Cesar­win­ning Towards Ten­der­ness saw her tack­le the frag­ile façades of young men, expos­ing the ten­der core encased in mas­cu­line bravado.

That same year Diop filmed in a Parisian refugee med­ical cen­tre and cap­tured the strug­gle of com­mu­ni­cat­ing care across a cul­tur­al divide. The penul­ti­mate film before her ​“debut” was 2021’s We which fol­lows the com­mu­ni­ties along the RER B com­muter train line and is com­posed as a rich tapes­try of the city’s most unrep­re­sent­ed and dis­pos­sessed peo­ple. Her lyri­cal com­po­si­tion and stud­ied approach to her sub­jects’ lives amounts to a sump­tu­ous act of defi­ance of the sta­tus quo.

So it is no won­der that when Diop saw an image of Fabi­enne Kabou in a news­pa­per, she felt she could see what oth­ers could not. ​“It was a still the police put out,” she explains. ​“A secu­ri­ty cam­era had cap­tured the woman they were look­ing for push­ing a pushchair at the sta­tion. I imme­di­ate­ly under­stood that she was Sene­galese, and then, as her tri­al approached, my inter­est kept increas­ing. I had a strange intu­ition about her, almost recog­nis­ing myself in this woman.”

Kabou was accused of killing her baby Ade­laide by leav­ing her on the beach as the tide came in. Beyond the hor­ri­fy­ing act itself, Diop became increas­ing­ly trou­bled by how Kabou was depict­ed in the media. ​“I read this woman was an intel­lec­tu­al writ­ing a the­sis on Wittgen­stein,” she says, ​“yet in con­trast, she was accused of witch­craft. The French media said she’s got an incred­i­ble way of speak­ing French, but obvi­ous­ly she’s going to speak very well if she’s doing a the­sis on Wittgen­stein. It was essen­tial­ly racist.”

She became ​“obsessed” with the case, and when Kabou’s tri­al began Diop – then preg­nant with her first child – trav­elled North to the town of Saint Omer near Calais con­vinced she would be able to tru­ly see Kabou. She arrived with a fixed per­cep­tion but, by her own admis­sion, was ​“total­ly wrong.” She con­tin­ues, ​“I knew that Fabi­enne couldn’t be what was pro­mot­ed by the racist thoughts of jour­nal­ists, so I told myself that only I can under­stand her as a Black woman.” Yet, in the many months before the tri­al, Diop had entan­gled both Kabou and her white part­ner into the nar­ra­tive of a 5^th cen­tu­ry Greek tragedy, where a woman is dri­ven to infan­ti­cide by her husband’s treach­ery. ​“Madea was a vic­tim of Jason, and I came to the jail with that sto­ry. I want­ed to see what kind of Jason her part­ner Michel Lafon was.”

The real­i­ty was far more com­plex, and all of Diop’s pre­sump­tions had to be re-eval­u­at­ed. ​“Even the Wittgen­stein the­sis was a com­plete lie,” she explains. ​“But the title she invent­ed still meant some­thing. She picked one of the hard­est philoso­phers to grasp.” The 20^th cen­tu­ry philosopher’s works are noto­ri­ous­ly impen­e­tra­ble, hav­ing pub­lished two books on lan­guage and log­ic that entire­ly under­mine one anoth­er. ​“Even in her lies,” Diop adds, ​“she’s telling us to see her as a per­son of con­tra­dic­tions.” Hav­ing observed the tri­al first hand and duly con­front­ed by those con­tra­dic­tions and the details of the most dev­as­tat­ing crimes imag­in­able, Diop, ​“realised it need­ed to be a film.”

But it was, ​“too late to film it for a doc­u­men­tary, so it had to be fic­tion. But by going into a fic­tion­al space, it could reveal my point of view.” Beyond a more abstract lens, there was also a lit­er­al refram­ing of the sto­ry in the choice to ​“embed these Black bod­ies at the cen­tre of the frame that are nor­mal­ly on the side – it makes you real­ly study them.”

Saint Omer’s pro­tag­o­nist, Rama (Kay­i­je Kagame), has many obvi­ous par­al­lels to Diop. But she is more than just a screen proxy: ​“She’s the con­duit of the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the sto­ry. Rama could have been a white writer, and it would’ve been uni­ver­sal as well, but mak­ing her a Black woman adds a polit­i­cal lev­el to the film.”

Diop isn’t a didac­tic film­mak­er, but those pol­i­tics appear naked, and she pays open trib­ute to Mar­guerite Duras, the nov­el­ist and film­mak­er who used her work to expose the hor­rors of colo­nial­ism and racism through a dis­tinct fem­i­nist lens. Diop intro­duces us to Rama giv­ing a lec­ture on Duras, speak­ing over her ​“images of women being shaved for being col­lab­o­ra­tors dur­ing the war.” But beyond estab­lish­ing the film­mak­ing lin­eage that Diop sees her­self as part of she want­ed to, ​“get to the essence of who Rama is before she becomes a silent fig­ure in the court­room. She’s at this most elite of aca­d­e­m­ic places, speak­ing about Mar­guerite Duras, and the film shows her embed­ded in French cul­ture and history.”

This is quick­ly fol­lowed up by a scene of Rama being ill at ease attend­ing a fam­i­ly din­ner, where there is a com­plete dis­con­nect with her moth­er. ​“She doesn’t speak in the Sene­galese dialect of Wolof, but her fam­i­ly is watch­ing some­thing in Wolof. It sets up Rama’s con­tra­dic­tions and those of being a Black French woman.” That idea spoke to Diop’s own com­plex per­son­al iden­ti­ty, and her rela­tion­ship to her Sene­galese her­itage. ​“Essen­tial­ly, I am French. All my cul­ture is French, but I dis­cov­ered Ous­mane Sem­bène too late. I come to films in Wolof as an out­sider. And Rama’s iden­ti­ty is the point of view of the film.”

The tri­al loca­tion was key to Diop, high­light­ing the unlike­li­hood of a Black woman receiv­ing a fair hear­ing in the eyes of the state. ​“We are sit­u­at­ed in this work­ing class, small­ish town and that’s where the jury is com­ing from.” While the media were quick to stereo­type Fabi­enne Kabou, Diop’s equiv­a­lent char­ac­ter Lau­rence Coly (Gus­lagie Mlan­ga) adopts a posi­tion that is made all the more pre­car­i­ous as a ​“Black woman in this space who’s being judged by these par­tic­u­lar peo­ple with a men­tal­i­ty that of emblem­at­ic of cer­tain towns in the north.”

Though the film, too, is fre­quent­ly dev­as­tat­ing, Diop’s point of view remains dis­tinct and avoids the reg­u­lar cin­e­mat­ic beats one would expect from such a court­room-based sto­ry. No cru­cial piece of evi­dence unlocks the mys­tery; there are no easy answers or rous­ing speech­es. Indeed, she cuts away moments into the prosecution’s con­clud­ing argu­ments. For Diop, it’s not real­ly a tri­al film. ​“It’s about who this woman was,” she says, which means fix­ing the cam­era close­ly on the defence lawyer as she deliv­ers a speech on ​“chi­maera” and the foun­da­tion­al mon­stros­i­ty of women.

Diop wrote the speech to be so pow­er­ful that, had been in the tri­al, she would’ve been acquit­ted. ​“I’m look­ing straight out at each spec­ta­tor and mak­ing them a mem­ber of the jury. I am explain­ing why we should acquit.” The speech is a tri­umph of writ­ing, film­mak­ing and per­for­mance, and the courtroom’s women col­lapse in uni­son with the audi­ence. Like Diop’s first inter­view, there’s a cathar­sis in being per­mit­ted to sim­ply ​“fall apart together.”