This feature film won the Grand Jury Prize and the prize for best first film at the Venice Film Festival 2022 on September 10. It will be released in theaters on November 23 in France and will be in the running in the “international feature film” category.
Article written by
Posted
Update
Reading time : 1 min.
Thirteen days after being awarded at the Venice Film Festival, Alice Diop’s film, Saint Omer, was selected on Friday, September 23, to represent France at the next Oscars ceremony. Inspired by a true story of an infanticide trial, Saint Omer seeks to explore “the great universal question” of our “relation to motherhood”, affirmed the director during the Mostra.
His film tells the story of Laurence Coly, played by Guslagie Malanda, 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.
This is the first feature film by the 43-year-old director, until then specializing in documentaries whose We (2021), which took the viewer to meet a territory – that crossed by the RER B – and its inhabitants.
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the First Film Prize in Venice, Saint Omer is “a powerful film, emblematic of the revival of French cinema that we are proud to have supported in particular by the advance on receipts”, welcomed the boss of the CNC, Dominique Boutonnat, quoted in the press release. It will be released in theaters on November 23.