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

The Saint Omer printing 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 untied 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 visualize such intensity.” Her elegant but harrowing tale is of Rama (Kayije Kagame), an wonk sitting in on the trial of a woman accused of infanticde. Diop’s mucosa placed her in a vulnerable position as it is tightly personal and her protagonist’s life and story resembles her own. But it has received love reports from critics, won the Silver Lion and Lion of The Future ribbon at the Venice Mucosa Festival and was selected as France’s entry to the Academy Awards.

That political statement was well-spoken at Venice where Diop ended her visa speech with the words, “Our silence will not protect us”. She was quoting the African-American poet and starchy rights objector 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 increasingly puzzling.

Diop’s very 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 overdue in order to confront the guilt that came from that visualization while moreover 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 two-face Steve Tientcheu.

Like Diop, Tientcheu is from The City of 3000, a poor Parisian suburb. He is wonted into the prestigious vicarial 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 wholesale stereotypes. (It’s worth noting that, in the decade since he said it on camera, Tientcheu’s dream of starring in films that premiere at “Cannes and Venice” has come true.) 2016’s Cesarwinning Towards Tenderness saw her tackle the fragile façades of young men, exposing the tender cadre encased in masculine bravado.

That same year Diop filmed in a Parisian refugee medical centre and captured the struggle of communicating superintendency wideness a cultural divide. The penultimate mucosa surpassing her “debut” was 2021’s We which follows the communities withal the RER B passenger train line and is well-balanced as a rich tapestry of the city’s most unrepresented and dispossessed people. Her lyrical sonnet and studied tideway to her subjects’ lives amounts to a sumptuous act of refractoriness 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 well-nigh her, scrutinizingly recognising myself in this woman.”

Kabou was accused of killing her victual Adelaide by leaving her on the waterfront as the tide came in. Vastitude 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 substantially 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 worldly-wise to truly see Kabou. She arrived with a stock-still 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 surpassing the trial, Diop had entangled both Kabou and her white partner into the narrative of a 5th 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 increasingly complex, and all of Diop’s presumptions had to be re-evaluated. “Even the Wittgenstein thesis was a well-constructed lie,” she explains. “But the title she invented still meant something. She picked one of the hardest philosophers to grasp.” The 20th 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 mucosa it for a documentary, so it had to be fiction. But by going into a fictional space, it could reveal my point of view.” Vastitude a increasingly utopian lens, there was moreover a literal reframing of the story in the nomination to “embed these Black persons 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 increasingly 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 towards naked, and she pays unshut tribute to Marguerite Duras, the novelist and filmmaker who used her work to expose the horrors of colonialism and racism through a unshared feminist lens. Diop introduces us to Rama giving a lecture on Duras, speaking over her “images of women stuff shaved for stuff collaborators during the war.” But vastitude establishing the filmmaking lineage that Diop sees herself as part of she wanted to, “get to the essence of who Rama is surpassing she becomes a silent icon in the courtroom. She’s at this most peerage of wonk places, speaking well-nigh Marguerite Duras, and the mucosa shows her embedded in French culture and history.”

This is quickly followed up by a scene of Rama stuff ill at ease peekaboo a family dinner, where there is a well-constructed 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 stuff a Black French woman.” That idea spoke to Diop’s own ramified 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 pearly hearing in the vision 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 weft Laurence Coly (Guslagie Mlanga) adopts a position that is made all the increasingly precarious as a “Black woman in this space who’s stuff judged by these particular people with a mentality that of typifying of unrepealable towns in the north.”

Though the film, too, is commonly devastating, Diop’s point of view remains unshared and avoids the regular cinematic beats one would expect from such a courtroom-based story. No crucial piece of vestige unlocks the mystery; there are no easy answers or rousing speeches. Indeed, she cuts yonder moments into the prosecution’s concluding arguments. For Diop, it’s not really a trial film. “It’s well-nigh who this woman was,” she says, which ways 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 swoon in unison with the audience. Like Diop’s first interview, there’s a catharsis in stuff permitted to simply “fall untied together.”