A version of this interview with “Saint Omer” director Alice Diop was first published in the International Film edition of awards magazine TheWrap.
In 2015, French filmmaker Alice Diop attended the trial of a Senegalese woman living in France who left her 15-month-old baby on a beach to be washed away by high tide. The story was tragic, horrible. And she aroused such complex feelings in Diop that she decided to make it the basis of her first fictional film, after several acclaimed documentaries.
“Saint Omer” unfolds from the point of view of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a newly pregnant novelist who, like Diop, sits in the courtroom gallery and tries to understand what drove Laurence (Guslagie Malanga) to commit infanticide. . The film won the Grand Jury Prize in Venice (as well as Best First Feature) and is France’s submission to the international Oscar category.
You based your film on a true story that fascinated you, and you’ve said you found something universal in the questions it posed. What about the case you found universal?
It is certainly very complicated. I mean, it may seem very strange to talk about universality and identification in such terrible and difficult news. When I talk about possible identification it is because when I went to the trial what interested me went far beyond the crime and the sordid news. It was: What drives a mother to have such an ambiguous and tragic relationship with her own child? What does it mean to be a mother? What is a mother? What are we made of? How does the mother we had, the childhood we had, shape us? All these questions are universal questions.
When Laurence is asked in court why she killed her son, she replies: “I don’t know. But I hope this test can teach me.” However, by the end of the film, she remains a mystery and her crime is just as incomprehensible. Did she attract you to the idea that the truth can never be known?
It sure fascinated me. I had never been in a criminal trial, and what fascinated me about the experience was the attempt to understand what the human soul is. In literature, writers have come close, but without, of course, ever claiming that they know what the 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 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 tell the truth of this woman or even judge her. That is why there is no verdict (shown) at the end, because each viewer is the judge and they judge it based on who they are and what emotions they have experienced.
You attended the actual 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 emerges from the trial is almost the entirety of the hearings, that is, all the dialogue and all the minutes of the actual trial have become the dialogue in the film between Laurence and the president (of the criminal court) and the witnesses. The documentary material from the actual trial fascinated me enormously, and (my co-writer and) we both collected very, very accurate material. From there, we worked on the fictional framework of the film embodied by Rama, who, although inspired by something I experienced, is actually a fictional character whose narrative reveals the true stakes of the film. By that I mean: this pregnant woman who goes to this trial but at the beginning of the movie she seems to not reverse her pregnancy at all. And what seems to move her in the trial is more an intellectual project than a literary project. And so, it’s the intimate journey that he undertakes that allows the narrative to unfold.
Speaking of Rama, the moment Laurence smiles at him from the dais, that scene haunted me. I played it like Laurence trying to make a connection with another black woman in this sea of white faces in court. Maybe my interpretation is very wrong…!
What you have to say about it interests me almost more than what I could tell you because the truth is that the film is very generous in what it asks of the viewer. I don’t make movies 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 each other and interpret. So your interpretation is accurate because it’s yours. This is how it could be (Laurence) looking for a link with this woman (Rama), who is almost a mirror of herself. And it can be the opposite, that is, this smile can tell you: “Actually, deep down, you are not like me? Am I not going to drag you into my own madness, into my own abyss? You can also see it like this. In any case, the scene is a turning point: Rama’s identification with Laurence reaches her most dangerous point. She had to get there, to that smile, to tell herself: “This woman is not me. I’m not the same. I don’t want to go where she takes me. She is sent back to her reality so she can be born as a mother, perhaps.
“Saint Omer” won two important prizes in Venice and is the entry to the Oscar of France. 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 Frenchwoman who represents France with a film starring two black actresses, that sentence is actually extremely political. It describes the ongoing political battle I waged when I decided to make movies, specifically to tell all these missing stories, not yet allowed to be told. Allow East story in that space, (told) from my position as a black woman, and representing contemporary French cinema, I feel that 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 about the Race Begins edition here, and the international edition here.
