” Our silence will not protect us, writes poet Audrey Lord, speaking of black women. And tonight, I want to say that we will no longer be silent. ” It is with these words that Alice Diop, very moved, in a sober white silk sheath, came to receive the Silver Lion, Grand Jury Prize at this 79th Venice Film Festival for “Saint Omer”, after having received the Lion of the Future for best first film a few moments earlier.
First feature film by the 43-year-old director, Saint-Omer returns to a news item which, in 2013, had upset France. A young woman of Senegalese origin, Fabienne Kabou, had abandoned her 15-month-old daughter at the rising tide, at Berck Plage. Diop draws from it a film of a rigor and a remarkable sobriety, behind closed doors of court where the word of the criminal is confronted with the glance of a woman in the room, novelist spectator. Two black women, therefore, in mirror image, played by two new faces, Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. The latter, in the role of the accused, sometimes absent from herself, sometimes burning with intensity, all in the desire to snatch her assignments, constantly recalls, through her interpretation, the ” sublime, absolutely sublime by Marguerite Duras (a great reference for the filmmaker).
“We will not be silent anymore”
It was in 2005 that the singular voice of Alice Diop was heard for the first time. Born in Aulnay-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis), in 1979, of parents from Senegal, came to the cinema after studying sociology and history at the Sorbonne, she then made her first documentary film, The World Touranchored at the Rose des vents, a huge district made up of several HLM bars in the north of Paris.
“ What is magnificent in the cinema is to think through the image, with its tools, and not to attach oneself immediately to an ideological framework », recently noted the filmmaker. A way of remembering what has always irrigated his work. Thus, when Clichy-sous-Bois flares up, after the death of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, France 5 commissions a report from him. She spends nearly a year in location scouting and draws the impressive Clichy For the example (2006) where his patient and informed approach, inspired by the great American documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman, contrasted with the media coverage of the event, to the chagrin of the channel: ” They were expecting a “Forbidden Zone” style embedded report, with police raids and company. And I give them a patient, calm approach, a sort of behind closed doors in the city “.
The pure grace of his cinematographic gesture
Will follow, on the same thread, Danton’s death and Permanence : the first on the training of the actor Steve Tientcheu at the Simon course, the other on Bobigny and a medical permanence for migrants. In 2016, his camera listened to young people from the neighborhoods, who confided in him loves and disappointments: Towards tenderness will receive the César for best short film.
In 2021, a new feature documentary, We, won the award for Best Film in the Encounters section, in 2021, at the Berlin Film Festival. In this oblique portrait of a France seen in the mirror of the RER B, from the rich and verdant Chevreuse valley to the gray concrete of the north of Paris, Alice Diop also returns to her family history, organizing through this “we” the meeting of populations allegedly incompatible, by the sheer grace of his cinematographic gesture.
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