![]() The script – which Diop wrote with her regular collaborator and editor Amrita David and the Goncourt-winning novelist Marie NDiaye – directly uses the words that were spoken in court, which Diop would write down from memory after each session. It was only later that I realised I needed to make it.” Like Saint Omer’s protagonist, writer and lecturer Rama, Diop attended the trial “wanting to think about uncomfortable questions that couldn’t easily be formulated. I found myself making up a story more beautiful, perhaps more acceptable than the real one, about a woman offering her child to a sea which could care for her.” She said: ‘I laid her on the sand, thinking the sea would carry her body away.’ Somehow that put the horror of the crime to one side: I was hearing something else. There was this psychoanalytic and mythical dimension underlying the way she explained her actions. “I went there under the magnetic pull of an obsession that for a long time I couldn’t put into words. Diop attended the trial, fascinated after reading about Kabou. ![]() Named after the northern French town where it is set, Saint Omer is inspired by the 2016 trial of Fabienne Kabou, a young woman originally from Senegal, charged with killing her baby daughter by leaving her on a beach. Rather than offering manipulated, melodramatic reversals, this intense, stately work has the ring of classical tragedy – closer to Racine than 12 Angry Men. Technically, Saint Omer could be classified as a courtroom drama, but hardly in the traditional sense. I can’t speak for all black French women, I can only speak for myself ![]() ![]() I’m constantly questioning this new position I’m in.” Indeed, this Sorbonne graduate with a masters in visual sociology comes across as a seriously analytical film-maker. “I make cinema because I have certain obsessions – not to be visible, but because I need to. ![]()
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