Through Saint Omera film in competition at the Venice festival inspired by a true story of a trial for infanticide, French filmmaker Alice Diop sought to explore “the great universal question” of our “relationship to motherhood”.
For her first fiction feature film, the director, César 2017 for her short film “Vers la tendresse”, told AFP that she had 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 protagonist of the film played by Guslagie Malanda, is a Senegalese immigrant accused of having killed her 15-month-old baby by abandoning her on a northern beach at rising tide. The film, centered on the trial, is directly inspired by a news item from 2013 and the trial that followed.
Alice Diop herself attended the hearing: “I was obsessed with this story from the start […] I was really very upset, flabbergasted, traversed by many rather intimate things about my relationship with motherhood”.
“All the women present at the trial were struck by something very, very intimate,” she says. An emotion that the director tries, sometimes clumsily, to transcribe in her film.
The accused, an outstanding speaker with a refined vocabulary, “is a projection surface for everyone”, underlines the director, who won an award in 2021 at the Berlin festival for her documentary “We”.
“She is a woman of enormous complexity. […] she is not a woman who necessarily arouses compassion, she is an extremely powerful woman, but who is also monstrous, who is also pathologically crazy, who has flaws, who has gray areas, who is not unambiguous,” she explains.
“It was a real creative pleasure to show […] the complexity of a woman like Laurence and to unleash imaginations on what a black woman is”, explains the director.
“A black woman can be an intellectual […] indeed, these are not figures that we are used to seeing, this is not where we are expected, but it is also where we are and, in fact, this is where I am “.
“A great pride”
Born herself in 1979 to Senegalese parents, Alice Diop grew up in Aulnay-sous-Bois in the suburbs of Paris before embarking on studies in history and then sociology, which led her to the documentary workshop of the prestigious Fémis film school.
For her, being a black woman in the running for the Golden Lion in Venice, “is a great source of pride”, even if I am only “the spokesperson for myself”.
And to qualify: “It is true that I would be even happier if I could be completely myself, that is to say that the more of us there would be, that is to say black women in competition, the more I will have the right to my singularity, because I am not just a black woman: I am a black woman whose name is Alice Diop and who is specific”.
“Me, it’s something that I defend deeply in each of my films […], that the black body can carry the universal. It’s not entirely won, but I don’t despair that it will be the case one day! Already my presence here proves that in a certain way it was heard,” says the director, who has worked with Claire Mathon, a very prominent cinematographer since the international success of “Portrait of a young girl on fire” by Celine Sciamma.
In front of her camera, actress Guslagie Malanda “really lived in Laurence”, notes Alice Diop. “She is staggering, completely inhabited, haunted by the role”.