The French filmmaker, of Senegalese origin, signs with “We » a sensitive film about ordinary people on the RER B line. A logical follow-up to his work, focused on reality and open to complexity.
” We does not mean my people, all those who are the same as me, but all those who can be the “I” of this us: to endorse it, to take it up as their own, to experience its strength. “. Alice Diop, 42, is not into the binary ways of thinking of the time. This quote is not from her, but from Marielle Macé, essayist and author of Our cabins (2019, Editions Verdier).
Loaded with references, awarded by the Berlinale and acclaimed by critics, this filmmaker brings a breath of fresh air and intelligence. She introduces sensitivity, complexity and the ordinary into the minefield of the suburbs, without falling into “identities”, nor into a context of a presidential campaign where everything is reduced to buzz and controversy.
Daughter of Senegalese parents who arrived in France in 1966, having grown up in the Cité des 3000 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, she wanted to pay tribute to François Maspero, author of Roissy-Express passengers (Threshold, 1990). A hike around line B, which connects the northern suburbs to the southern suburbs, and which told for the first time in its sense the suburbs “ not locked into a sociological or journalistic discourse » but carried by an author’s pleasure. ” These non-places that I had inhabited, this writer, in the magnificent beauty of his language, made them remarkable and gave us back a form of dignity “, she underlines on French Culture.
Reflections on a “creolized” Hexagon
Another click: the attacks of January and November 2015, in Paris. This ” historic moment of changeover which questions what a country, a society is “, encourages him to embark on ” We “, a project which, beyond France, concerns all the companies which “ creole in Europe “. The One of Release in January 2015, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, proclaimed ” We are a people “. She calls out to him. ” This “we” is for me elastic, she specifies, unaware of how he can make hospitality to people he has not yet seen “.
The intimate is very present in ” We », with an assumed subjective look, around a route that is part of his personal topography. The filmmaker follows her nurse sister, meeting people and their destinies along this RER line. She questions her own father, just after a sequence on a Catholic mass celebrating Louis XVI, late King of France, at the Saint-Denis Basilica.
The stations in the film are not mentioned, and the testimonies are all the stronger in that they categorically refuse the cliché, the representation of an identity or any social category. ” Revisiting a dominant imagination that sees permanent violence, rather looking at the suburbs in its banality, seeing the part of universal in stories and lives », such is the project. She comes out of the gaze of the other, to focus her own on an experience that cannot be recovered by speeches.
A personality first and foremost true to itself
Alice Diop has a Master’s degree in history at the Sorbonne and a DESS in visual sociology. She explains that she has a 180 degree view of French society », from which she made her strength. She joined the documentary workshop of La Fémis and since 2005 has been making remarkable documentaries, linked together by the coherence of her gaze.
After The World Tour (2005), a journey through the stairwell of an Aulnay-sous-Bois public housing project, into the worlds of families from Sri Lanka, Mali, Turkey and the Congo, she continues to film the Parisian suburbs in its own way.
The tragedy of Zyad and Bouna, electrocuted at the age of 15, to escape police control, then the riots of 2005 in the suburbs, plunge it into a necessity and an emergency. ” The story that was made of it was so violent that I needed to take a camera and go to Clichy for a year to console myself. “. She draws a counter-narrative from it, Clichy for example (2007), whose calm, poised and documented character earned him rejection by the television channel that had commissioned him.
After a detour via Senegal, where she turns The Senegalese and the Senegalese (2007), about three women in his family and his personal place in the courtyard of a household, The Death of Danton (2011) returns to France on the training course Simon of actor Steve Tientcheu. “A film about silent violence and the unthought of racism rooted in everyday experience”.
Permanence (2016) fixes his gaze on a doctor from Bobigny examining migrants and the ills of exile, Grand Prix of the French competition at the Cinéma du réel festival. His next documentary, Towards tenderness (2016), where four young people from the neighborhoods confide in their love life, won him the César for best short film in 2017.
His next project, almost completed, is his first fiction feature, Saint Omer, written in collaboration with his editor Amrita David and the author Marie NDiaye. Alice Diop, who also participates in a media library project in the suburbs with the Center Pompidou, pulverizes the conflict – a French passion – by gaining height. True to herself, she upholds the values of intellectual honesty and deep humanity, which it is not forbidden to think are both made in France and made in Senegal.
► To read: Senegalese filmmakers: a new wave?