Interview: Alice Diop on Upending True Crime Conventions with Saint Omer

“Wow, big question!” Alice Diop exclaims in English when her translator explains one of my prompts for her reflection. Such are the only questions worth posing in regards to Diop’s narrative feature debut, Saint Omer. It’s a work of deceptive simplicity that gradually reveals a structure of aesthetic and intellectual rigor alike.

The film bears many traces of Diop’s background in documentary, including the story’s real-life origins. Saint Omer takes its inspirations from the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a French-Senegalese woman who faced charges in 2016 for murdering her daughter on a beach. Diop attended the trial and worked much of the transcript into the case against fictionalized defendant Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda). The facts of the incident emerge quickly in the legal proceedings, but the filmmaker complicates any simplistic verdict on Laurence with her methodical unraveling of the countless layers of indignity and indifference shown toward her subject.

Yet Diop doesn’t limit her vantage point solely to Rama (Kayije Kagame), the professor surreptitiously observing the trial from the spectator seating area. The personal entry point expands beyond even the political dimensions of race, gender, class, or national origin and arrives at an interrogation of the mythological elements of Medea. By elevating the figure of the Black woman to a place of centrality and universality in her work, Diop confronts centuries of representational neglect head-on. Saint Omer scintillatingly suggests the courtroom is but one institution where justice is proclaimed but not always served.

I spoke with Diop last year in New York. Our talk covered her influences, her approach to genre, and her subtle yet powerful aesthetic choices across editing, costuming, and sound design.

Your film circles themes explored by Marguerite Duras. How did you decide to foreground that influence with an excerpt of Hiroshima Mon Amour?

It really has more to do with Marguerite Duras in general than Hiroshima Mon Amour in particular. We do hear Hiroshima Mon Amour in the sequence, but we also see the shaved women at the liberation of France in this class that’s being taught by a woman in the most elevated level of French academic culture. It’s the amphitheater of the École [libre des] sciences politiques, Science Po, which is the highest level of legitimate academic culture. And so that poses, in a sense, the political question of the film. You have a Black woman who is teaching in this very elevated place, who is a writer, who is brilliant, and she’s in a place where we’re not used to seeing her. So that’s the political side right off the bat. Now, this Black woman is a writer and, in many senses, she’s interested in things that Marguerite Duras was interested in as well: complexity, ambivalence, feminine-filled female figures. And then the film is going to look at this woman who’s been accused, so there’s all these different levels.

That film opens with such a powerful repeated line: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” What does it mean to you to see, really see something or someone?

To see, for me, I think the answer is in my films. It’s a question I can’t answer theoretically. I can only answer materially. What I see is in the films. I propose my films allow us to look from a specific place that hasn’t been much explored yet: that of a Black Frenchwoman, a European woman of the 21st century who’s 43 years old and is perhaps seeing with a greater intellectual maturity than she had 20 years ago.

As I was watching your previous documentaries, I thought a lot about Frederick Wiseman and your shared fondness for looking inside institutions to understand individuals: the RER-B, the hospital, the courtroom. Is this film an extension of your background in sociology and anthropology?

Honestly, I don’t think that my films rest on an interest in institutions. I think I’m much more interested the singularity of people who are often reduced to stereotypes. What drives me in cinema is to show the complexity of people who are not seen, who are locked into a dominant gaze, or who are locked into only fantasy images that replicate a power dynamic. I’m much more interested in individuals. I’m not interested in “migrants,” for instance. What I’m interested in is specific people who took the risk of migrating. I’m not interested in “Blacks” [so much as] I’m interested in specific individuals and the singularity that inhabits us.

You’d never been to court before attending the trial of Fabienne Kabou. How did you come to see and understand the space of the courtroom?

What fascinated me about the court and the trial was its public nature. The court is a place where an entire society is called and brought. Now, I don’t know if what interested me is true only of this trial, since it’s my only experience. I don’t know if what I’m describing is common, but the judicial or the legal ritual describes a person by lining up objective facts. And this I found fascinating. They were trying to shed light on the mystery of this woman with the judicial machine by looking only at factual elements. They were being very factual about the human psyche but, at the same time, somehow escaping it. I had the impression that I was witnessing one of Dostoyevsky’s great novels, for instance, in the way that we were exploring and going through the human psyche. But we weren’t doing it through literature or philosophy. [We were doing it through] this factual nature of the ritual of court.

Does France also share a “true crime” obsession like the United States? The film feels like such a powerful rebuke to that genre’s fallacy that we can understand or comprehend someone who transgresses simply by learning all the facts.

That’s exactly the reason why I made the film. It’s because I don’t understand this woman because I didn’t understand her at the trial, and I still don’t understand her now. And because I don’t understand her, that makes me ask questions about myself. That’s what I offer to the viewer—to ask him or herself questions. Yes, of course, true crime is a popular genre in France. My approach was specifically not to follow in that genre. The reason this true crime, this incident, interested me was much more than the crime. It’s because it allowed me to bring up all these other issues that range from mythology to tragedy to a collective portrait of a society. So, in the true crime genre, the kind of thing that has appealed to me is something like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which goes beyond the morbid fascination for a true crime story and probably describes 1960s America far more pertinently than most sociological works of the time. In the things that interest me, you have a crime that says so much more than it seems to say.

Costuming in contemporary films doesn’t get a lot of discussion. Can you talk about how you came to dress Laurence in a brown that almost makes her fade into the courtroom wall, while Rama stands out in brighter colors? How do you make it feel real but also communicate something thematically about the characters?

It’s funny, I’ve never been asked about Rama’s costume before. So, I’m delighted to hear that question, but it’s also a huge challenge for me because I’ve never thought about Rama’s costume. I thought a great deal about Laurence’s costume, but Rama’s costume, no. I think for Rama it was more sociological, the approach to her costume. How does a Parisian Black woman who is in a certain intellectual milieu dress? We talked about the colors of her costumes with the director of photography. But with Rama, it was primarily guided by a sociological concern and the documentary truth of the character. With Laurence, it was a question of picturality to have this Black woman who is offered up in full frame for these long minutes.

We really needed the viewer to settle into the frame, to have the image be hypnotic. To think about what draws us, for instance, in classical and Renaissance painting—which, incidentally, was our main pictorial reference. We needed to create the conditions for it to be hypnotic, aspiring to really draw us into the narrative of this woman who’s going to recount her story in these sequences of very long shots. To have this kind of body—and by that I mean a Black woman’s body—in the full frame of a film is a reflection of the continuity of the history of cinema. In a sense, it repairs an absence to make her appear in the center of the frame.

You’ve talked about using long takes to give your viewers freedom. What guided you in determining when and where to cut?

The editing process with my editor was so organic and intuitive that it’s really too hard for me to try to remember what guided our choices. In fact, it’s practically impossible. It has to do with the internal breathing of the film. I think that’s what guided us, but I really can’t be more specific because it’s asking me to actually go back into the state of trance that we edited this film in.

It’s looking for emotion. The principles that guided us are, on the one hand, political. For example, these long shots offer to the viewer the experience of exploring the psyche, the mystery, the density, the complexity of a Black woman, which is something that we don’t see much in cinema—particularly in French cinema. And then, there’s also the search for “justesse.” What is right? What is accurate? What is true? I couldn’t tell you why this shot lasts this number of minutes, but there’s that principle of “justesse.”

How did you approach the sound design? We’ve talked about the images, but the last element of the narrative that we experience is the sound of breathing.

The breathing, for me, is a way for us to be very close to Rama, a character who doesn’t speak but whose breathing we hear. Her breathing says so much about what she sees, the intensity of her listening, and her dangerous closeness to this woman Laurence Coly. There’s something very physical about her listening, and there’s something that’s also very physical in the film for the spectators. I think that the breathing makes this cerebral, rather intellectual, film sensual.

One of the film’s primary aims is to invest the universal in the figure of the Black woman. Now that you’ve taken the film around the world for a few months, have you seen any more culturally specific responses emerge?

It’s certain that the film is very specific as to the story of the women that it is telling. But it’s also very universal in a way that it quickly raises the question of maternity, which is someone that everyone around the world, women and men, is invested with. But depending on whether you’re a white woman or a Black woman, a male in the United States, a male in France, a male who has to some degree been deconstructed by the questions that are raised in Saint Omer, whether you’re French, whether you’re American, whether you’re Romanian, everyone sees this film from his or her place or position. And that’s what I find really fascinating as I go around the world collecting reactions to the film. It gives us a sense of where the world stands in terms of the colonial issue, the gender issue, the patriarchal issue, and this is something very meaningful.

Have these reactions given you a new lens through which to view the film?

All the time, even right now. All of my films are a path or a journey in thought, in my own reflection. That continues after the film has been made—in the questions that I’m asked and the answers that I give. [They] are never the same. That proves that the film is alive. If I was always repeating the same answers, the film would be much less alive. I’m constantly getting closer to understanding what I did through what people say about the film, which is really great, because otherwise I would probably be quite bored in this emotional exercise.

The underlying question of your last film, We, was “how do we build we or us?” in the context of France. Is this film still grappling with that question? Has it changed your answer?

Well, I never claimed to have the answer, and that’s a good thing. Because this question of “we,” of “us,” is so floating and loose, you can’t define it. I didn’t define it in the four years that it took to make We. And though in making Saint Omer, I kept questioning and interrogating it, I certainly didn’t define it. The goal is not to set a definition for it.

Translation by Nicholas Elliott