Saint Omer

Released in 2022, Saint Omer is the first fiction feature by French documentary filmmaker Alice Diop, whose earlier non-fiction work (La Permanence, Nous) had already established her as a significant voice in French cinema. The script is adapted from the real 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, which Diop attended in person. The film premiered in Competition at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a debut feature.

Kayije Kagame plays Rama, the writer-observer at the centre of the film, and Guslagie Malanda plays the accused Laurence Coly in long, near-static close-ups that draw closely on transcripts of the original proceedings. Cinematographer Claire Mathon, who shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Atlantics, frames the courtroom in formal, almost theatrical compositions, while a sparing use of music gives the testimony space to expand. Around the two leads, Valérie Dréville plays the presiding judge with documentary precision.

The reception in France was emphatic. Saint Omer won the Louis Delluc Prize, the César for Best First Feature and was selected as France's submission for the 95th Academy Awards. Internationally, it was widely placed on year-end lists and treated as one of the major debuts of the decade, reframing the courtroom drama as a question about who is heard, who is believed, and how a woman of African descent is asked to narrate her own life inside the institutions of the French state.