French director Alice Diop’s ‘Saint Omer’ explores a mother’s unspeakable act

French filmmaker Alice Diop at first didn’t understand why she felt so drawn to the true-life story of a French woman of Senegalese origin on trial for the drowning death of her daughter.

“I was obsessed by this case for a very long time without knowing exactly,” Diop says through a translator on a recent video call. “In fact, it was a sentence that I read in a newspaper that caught my attention.

“I read that when she was asked why she did this terrible gesture she said that she did not understand why she did it,” Diop says. “But that she lay her daughter, her young daughter on the sand because she wanted the ocean, the sea, to take her away with the rising tide.

“This image absolutely haunted me and intrigued me,” she says.

“Saint Omer” is the film that eventually developed from Diop’s obsession with the story. Her first fictional feature film after a career making documentaries, “Saint Omer” sticks closely to the facts of the trial of Fabienne Kabou, who in 2013 left her 15-month-old child on the shore near the northern French city that gives the film its name.

While the film mostly takes place on a courtroom set recreated inside the actual courthouse where the trial took place, “Saint Omer” is nothing like a typical trial movie.

The French media had focused on the sensational aspects of the case – Kabou, a brilliant doctoral student, said she’d been compelled to kill her daughter by “witchcraft.” Diop, who attended the trial, wanted to dig deeper into what made her able to commit such a terrible act.

“When I went to watch the trial, I had no idea to what extent it would overwhelm me emotionally,” Diop says. “How it would open some very intimate doors within that I didn’t know where there.

“Also, I noticed how much many women were touched in the same way that I was, and I realized that this affair brought about a very deep and universal concern for women,” she says.

In September, “Saint Omer” won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, and Diop the award for best directing debut. In December, the film was one of 15 short-listed for consideration for the 2023 Academy Award for best international feature, making Diop the first Black woman ever to represent that country in the Oscars competition.

Guslagie Malanda, who joined Diop on the video call, plays Laurence Coly, the mother on trial on “Saint Omer.” Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a teacher and novelist drawn to the courtroom to watch the trial every day, much like Diop herself had done.

Here, in an interview edited for length and clarity, are Diop’s and Guslagie’s memories of making the film and their thoughts on a range of topics including motherhood, isolation and the representation of Black women in French film.

Q: How did you come to see the story of Fabienne Kabou as a potential film?

Diop: When I went there, I didn’t really know I was going to make a film out of it, but towards the end the overwhelming emotion that I felt and the way it opened extremely intimate questions to me really stirred something.

And also, beyond the story being a magnet for me, I have to say that when I watched the trial I realized that it was an opportunity to talk about Black women in a way that had rarely been talked about. And to bring out the complexity, the humanity of such a character in a way that was never talked about with the story of Kabou.

Q: Guslagie, did you follow this story in the media at the time?

Malanda: So my parents, they remember that story, and a lot of people in France do. But I was too young. I remember something like a noise, but no, I didn’t follow the case.

Q: What made you decide that the role of Laurence was one you wanted to take on, and how did you find your way into the character?

Malanda: Something happened during the casting when Alice told me to be a woman called Mary Lou in Jean Rouch’s movie ‘Chronique d’un été’ (‘Chronicle of a Summer’). It’s a young woman, and she talked about the beginning of a kind of depression, a delusion.

Something happened with this text and the interpretation of Mary Lou because I understand maybe something regarding that loneliness of Laurence Coly. It was the first door to work on the film.

Q: Alice, this is your first feature film – what was it like to shift from documentaries to a fictional way of storytelling?

Diop: I really do not make a clear distinction between my work of directing fiction or a documentary. For me, I am the same person. I am the same director. Besides, this film has a lot of elements that are of documentary quality. For example, we used dialogue, particularly in the courtroom, very closely based on the court transcript.

What is important, the most important for me, is my approach to the direction. And that doesn’t change for me very much between a documentary or a fiction film.

Q: Guslagie, your role requires you stand in front of the camera for long takes as you testify. How did you prepare for this kind of subtle yet demanding kind of acting?

Malanda: So, one, two months before shooting I was training with a tai chi master regarding the breath, breathing. What it is to speak and have a very clear manner to an audience. Because the set was in the real courtroom, and everybody was there, all along the shooting, so it was important for me to work on my breath.

Also, one of the main rules Alice gave me, it’s you have to be straight in your body and to speak really clearly, but without anything that we can call a performance – not to perform, not to act. So yeah, it was intense, and during the shooting, because of that work with Alice, we found the attitude of the character.

Q: I want to ask you, Alice, about portraying the complexity or universality of Black women in this film, and what Laurence and Rama might provide that people have not seen in other films.

Diop: I really suffered in France to see how limited the portraits of Black women were, and how enclosed in a very clichéd manner it was. So this is very important to me to express a much wider dimension of Black women.

Q: The film feels like anyone could relate to the story – you could be a woman or man anywhere.

Diop: I completely agree. For me, the Black body is a universal archetype. And I think that everyone can connect – that’s one of the main subjects I wanted to present. I think all over the world, white women or otherwise, can recognize themselves in this character.

This film was shown all over the world, even in China where there are no Black women. And they could relate to it also in that universal dimension. Men also.

Q: You end the film before the jury delivers a verdict. Tell me about that choice.

Diop: For me, ‘Saint Omer’ is not principally a story of a trial. It’s a story of listening. Of listening to a woman and the complexity of what is taking place in her. And I felt that when I was in the trial, listening to these women, it was the opening of the door towards the most hidden, the most terrifying thing relative to the deepest fear inside us, that she brought the reflection to.

My goal in this was not really to decide how we judge this woman but more for the audience, for each spectator, to go within and listen to her and bring up the question that it opened within each of us.

Obviously, there is a miraculous thing that takes place in the movie. You have the occasion to scrutinize a human being the way you look at it, the way you frame it, that of course doesn’t exist in real life. That gives the audience the occasion to interrogate themselves.

Yes, at the end she was condemned; she received 20 years. But I’m nearly certain that if we had interviewed the people that followed the trial – that were in the audience (for the film) – they would find her not guilty or excused her at about 90 percent.