She won the Grand Jury Prize and the First Film Prize for her first fiction inspired by a news item and the trial that followed.
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French filmmaker Alice Diop scored twice on Saturday September 10 in Venice. She won the Grand Jury Prize and the First Film Prize for her first fiction, Saint-Omer.
“I have no more words”said the filmmaker, very moved, receiving her award and highlighting her feminist fight, in particular that “women of color” : “Silence will not protect us. We will no longer be silent”she promised.
Inspired by a true story of an infanticide trial, Saint Omer seeks to explore “the great universal question” of our “relation to motherhood”. The director until now specialized in documentaries, César 2017 for her short film Towards tendernesssaid during the festival that he used “a news item of sordid appearance to go and question something much larger, which is the relationship that all women and all men have with motherhood”.
Laurence Coly, the film’s protagonist played by Guslagie Malanda, is a Senegalese immigrant accused of having killed her 15-month-old baby by abandoning her on a beach in northern France at high tide.
The film focuses on the trial, which Alice Diop attended. “I was obsessed with this story from the start (…) I was really very upset, flabbergasted, crossed by a lot of quite intimate things about my relationship with motherhood”, she confided. The film will be released in France on November 23.