(ANSA) - ROME, DECEMBER 05 - A true story that shocked France and which becomes a film in Saint Omer by newcomer Alice Diop.
All based on the story of a Senegalese, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), accused of having killed her fifteen-month-old daughter by abandoning her on a beach in northern France.
But the film, already in competition at the Venice Film Festival - where it won the Silver Lion and that of the Future - and in the running for France at the 2023 Oscars, in theaters from 8 December with Medusa - also tells the story of a thirty-year-old novelist , Rama (Kayije Kagame), who wants to use the trial at the Saint-Omer Criminal Court as a starting point for his novel.
A sort of alter ego of Alice Diop who not by chance found herself among the large audience of the trial, fascinated like many by this cold assassin,
"I moved from documentaries to this film - explains the director in Rome - because it allows a much larger audience to access political issues. I started with documentaries because I missed the representation of some things, black bodies in action, all that part of French society that is never represented and which I wanted to tell instead. Experiencing being black in a country like France is like experiencing invisibility".
And again on her relationship with France: "The way this film and myself are perceived is very different in France compared to the rest of the world, especially in the United States. Perhaps because I represent something new in the French cinematographic panorama. But the bizarre thing is that in France those who objected to my film did so not with respect to its contents, but because I quoted Pasolini and Margherite Duras. They said I am arrogant and presumptuous. In the United States it is different because thirty years ago they had a black woman, Toni Morrison, as Nobel prize It's not a strange thing for them to address certain issues".
(HANDLE).