They were the first ones that I called for the first auditions. So the echoes of their images were in my mind while I was writing. I met at a dinner and I realized there was something very powerful, as if she was haunted by something. I asked to take a picture of her because I was making the film and she let me. ![]() She raised her hand and asked a question, and I was immediately mesmerized and fascinated by this woman. As for Kayije, I found myself in Geneva talking about a documentary of mine. I met them at the same time when I was beginning to write the screenplay. How did you cast the lead actors, Kayije Kagame as Rama and Guslagie Malanda as Laurence Coly (the Fabienne Kamou character)? I just wanted to show the complexity of that human being, which is what interested me the most. But I didn’t want to pass any judgment and give answers to those questions. she’s completely crazy.” She’s all of those things together. So I decided to make a film about it.įabienne Kamou’s story brings out all these reactions-she’s an object of morbid fascination, and in the film she almost becomes a figure of resistance on the stand-but how do you view her? And I decided that since I shared those same emotions with so many women, if we were all so obsessed with that event, it meant there was something universal in the story, which had to do with motherhood. I found myself engrossed by this painful situation, together with all the women who were there, too-attendees, lawyers, judges, journalists, most of us were women! I wanted to find answers to my own intimate questions that I had asked myself about my relationship with my own mother and being a mother myself. I had to attend the trial to try to understand. When I learned that she was the mother who had killed that little baby, my interest became a real obsession. I knew from her features that she was from Senegal, which is my family’s background too, even before they said she was from Senegal. And I immediately felt a familiarity with that face. The body of a child had been found on a shore in the north of France, and this image was published on notices looking for Kabou all over the country. You saw this woman who was pushing a baby in a stroller. It was a grainy picture taken from a surveillance camera in Gare de Nord in Paris. The story started from a photograph that I saw published in Le Monde. How did you first encounter the story of Fabienne Kabou? After talking about the documentary master Frederick Wiseman-Diop told me she used a monologue from his 1975 classic Welfare for auditioning her actors-we discussed the complicated attraction the story held for her. I interviewed Diop on the Lido in Venice, and it was all her translator could do to keep up with her. Diop’s previous film, We, won a top award at the Berlin Film Festival for its thoughtful panorama of predominantly black and immigrant communities living along a French train line. ![]() ![]() Diop reworks our notions of courtroom drama and stirs in scenes with Rama’s mother and partner, in order to reflect on family, justice, identity, selfhood, and memory. (It screens next in the Toronto and New York film festivals.) Based on the true story of Fabienne Kamou and partly composed from court transcripts, it’s a multilayered movie that feels irreducible. Saint Omer premiered this past week at the Venice Film Festival, more typically known as a spectacular showcase for fall movies like White Noise or The Whale-but Diop’s work deserves the same attention. And in a welter of emotions, she muses on the prospect of motherhood, with a child on the way herself. Through their shared Senegalese backgrounds and academic pursuits, Rama identifies with Laurence-a PhD student who strikes a placidly defiant figure in court, amid elitist and racist attitudes. ![]() Rama (Kayije Kagame), whom we first see teaching a class on Marguerite Duras, travels to another town to attend the trial of Laurence Coly, who has been accused of leaving her baby to perish on a beach. Winner of the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize in Venice, Alice Diop’s tour de force Saint Omer follows a novelist who becomes obsessed with a woman who has committed an unthinkable crime.
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