Barry Jenkins: ‘Alice Diop film ‘Saint Omer’ is sublime and unflinching’
Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, has praised Alice Diop’s first narrative feature film Saint Omer, calling it “masterful” and “sublime.”
The French legal drama, released domestically in November 2022, follows Rama, a pregnant novelist who attends the trial of a woman accused of murdering her baby by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide. Rama becomes obsessed with the trial, attempting to turn the tragic events into a literary retelling of the story of Medea.
Diop, whose filmmaking experience is routed mainly in documentary-making, was inspired by the 2016 French court case of Fabienne Kabou, who committed the same crime. The director also attended the trial whilst pregnant with her first child and noticed that almost everyone in attendance was female.
Discussing Saint Omer, Diop explained how she “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. 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. So I decided to make a film about it.”
Jenkins took to Twitter to declare his love for the film, writing: “Vibrates at a rare wavelength. Sublime expression built on sincere, concrete images. Unflinching. Guslagie Malanda is INCREDIBLE. There is… a LOT to unpack here, more than can be tweeted. Masterful work by Alice Diop; brave. This… has left me stunned.”
Saint Omer has been shortlisted for the upcoming Academy Awards and will be released in the UK on February 3rd, 2023.
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