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“Saint Omer” borrows details from a case of infanticide in France, which the director found raised profound but very personal issues.When the French director Alice Diop attended the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a woman who left her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to drown, she wasn’t intending to make a movie. She felt an “unusual identification” with the person at the center of the 2016 case, she said in a recent interview, who like her was a Black woman of Senegalese descent with a mixed race child. She believed there was a “nearly mythological dimension” to the tragedy.As the proceedings unfolded, however, Diop realized she wasn’t the only woman who had been drawn to the town of Saint-Omer in the north of France to observe Kabou. Looking around her during the defense’s closing arguments, Diop saw others in tears. “The story was bringing everybody back to profound and very personal issues,” Diop said through an interpreter during an interview in New York last week. She continued, “The conviction that I was going to do a film about it came from that very moment.”Her experiences sitting in that courtroom have morphed into “Saint Omer,” the documentarian’s first venture into narrative features. Upon premiering at the Venice Film Festival last year, it was awarded the distinction of best debut film and the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, essentially second place at the prestigious event. It is now shortlisted for the Academy Award for international feature. Diop is the first Black woman to direct a film France has submitted for Oscar consideration.“Saint Omer” adds a fictional superstructure to Kabou’s case, with the novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) providing the audience’s window into the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda). The details of the case remain the same: Like Kabou, Coly does not deny killing her daughter, born in secret and the result of a relationship with an older white man, but describes a descent into madness brought on by “sorcery.”Though Rama is ostensibly there to conduct research for her next book, a riff on Medea, watching Laurence provokes her to contemplate her nascent pregnancy as well as her strained relationship with her own mother. Diop shifts between an intimate portrayal of Rama’s silent moments alone with her thoughts and her changing body, and Laurence’s harrowing testimony rendered in long, unbroken shots that force the audience to both sit with disturbing information and consider this woman’s humanity.To Diop, training the camera on a complex Black woman for that length of time was a “political act,” she said, adding, “It was also a way to show a Black woman in a way that I had never seen shown before.”The film has a raft of heavyweight fans. In his Critic’s Pick review for The Times, A.O. Scott called “Saint Omer” an “intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.”Guslagie Malanda plays a woman who has killed her baby in “Saint Omer.”SuperThe director Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) compared the experience of watching “Saint Omer” to what it must have been like in 1975 to watch Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” recently named the best film of all time in the Sight and Sound poll. “One finds oneself in front of a cinema poem — Alice’s language, in the history of the language of cinema to which it belongs, but also in her own history, is dangerous and radiant,” Sciamma said via email.Diop, 43, came to filmmaking after studying colonial history at the Sorbonne, where she recognized her desire to unpack French society and the lingering effects of colonialism from her perspective as the daughter of Senegalese immigrants. She could have chosen other ways to explore the subject, but, to her, cinema held the most power.That calling is evident, for instance, in “We (Nous),” her 2022 documentary. It’s made up of a series of unconnected vignettes capturing a diverse array of life in the Paris suburbs, and also includes archival footage of Diop’s own family and her reminiscences. Though “Saint Omer” is her first foray into fiction, she sees it as a “continuation and extension” of the rest of her oeuvre.As Diop was observing Kabou’s trial, she started to keep a diary recording what was said, which would eventually become the framework of the screenplay she wrote alongside her editor, Amrita David, and the novelist Marie NDiaye. Diop’s note-taking was both a result of her instincts as a documentarian and a coping mechanism.“I believe that by writing it I was creating a distance with the subject of this matter that was so corrosive, so difficult,” she said, sitting in the empty Film at Lincoln Center amphitheater as “Saint Omer” played on one of the theater’s screens, her expertly tailored tan coat complementing the room’s orange seats.The longer Diop spent writing down what Kabou said, the more precise her notes became. “The film started to be born within my notes,” she said. But she didn’t want the film to be a straight recounting of events, and realized in the writing process that she needed another character whose reaction to Laurence could highlight the themes of maternal ambivalence she wanted to explore.The notes Diop took during the actual trial became the screenplay for “Saint Omer.”Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesRama is not autobiographical, Diop said, a point reiterated by Kagame, the actress who portrays her. “Alice always had this cautionary warning before everything, saying, ‘Rama is not me,’” Kagame said through an interpreter during a video call. Equally, Kagame added, “Of course, I think any artist is always putting so much of themselves in their creation. Rama is her and yet it is not her so that we can all project ourselves in Rama.” Indeed, Diop said that Rama’s gaze did allow her to “process lots of very deep personal things.”Though Diop said that fiction was the best form for “Saint Omer,” despite its real-life influences, she did approach the casting process with her documentary work in mind. “I was not looking for actresses that could perform the part,” she said. “I was looking for someone that would be the part as much as possible.”For Malanda, who had not acted in seven years before the role came to her, becoming Laurence took its toll. She explained in a video call that she had nightmares for a full year, and that the effects of playing a woman responsible for the death of her child still linger. “The story is in my body forever,” she said. “This may be the most weird but also the most true empathy.”Malanda felt supported during the production process, she said, but isolated by the fact her character spends the movie standing trial. Diop and the first assistant director told Malanda she was “possessed” during filming, Malanda said, adding, “I think it’s true.”That specter of the tragedy lingered on set, especially given that Diop filmed in the actual Saint-Omer courtroom where Kabou’s trial took place. In that space, reality and fiction blended.“She did everything she could to place everyone in that same emotional situation, as if we had been in the actual trials,” Kagame said. This setting added verisimilitude, but also made the experience emotionally charged. “It was very strange, but I felt that I started a sort of collective haunted situation,” Diop said.During filming, the majority-female crew went through what Diop described as group “collective psychotherapy” as they individually reflected on their own bonds with their mothers and children. Though Diop is reluctant to say too much about how the experience of “Saint Omer” changed her views on the subject, because she wants audiences to come to their own conclusions, she did experience a shift.“There is no doubt that the process of going through this film is something that healed me,” she said, “that helped me put lights on certain things, that helped me repair some wounds.” More

A real-life case of infanticide is the basis of Alice Diop’s rigorous and wrenching courtroom drama.“Saint Omer,” Alice Diop’s first nondocumentary feature, is a courtroom drama and also an unusual kind of true-crime chronicle.In 2016, Fabienne Kabou appeared in a provincial French court, charged with killing her daughter, who was a little more than a year old. Diop, who attended Kabou’s trial, has turned the case and her own fascination with it into an intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.The actions of Laurence Coly — the character modeled after Kabou, played by Guslagie Malanda with the tragic, piercing dignity of a Racine heroine — are not in doubt. On the stand, she admits to traveling by train from Paris with her 15-month-old daughter, Elise, to the seaside town of Berck-sur-Mer, where she left the child asleep on the beach to be carried away by the tide. The job of the judge and jury in Saint Omer, the small city in northern France where the trial takes place, is to figure out why Laurence killed Elise and to pass sentence on her.To put it in terms more consistent with the exalted language of the proceedings, the court seeks to comprehend what seems to be a profoundly irrational crime within the rigorous light of reason. The compassionate judge (Valérie Dréville), the skeptical prosecutor (Robert Cantarella) and the openhearted defense attorney (Aurélia Petit) cite principles of psychology, ethics and anthropology as well as law.Laurence herself, a former philosophy student who names Descartes and Wittgenstein as influences, to some extent shares in the magistrates’ spirit of inquiry, treating her own motives as if they posed an especially vexing problem of interpretation. Her account of the events leading up to Elise’s death is lucid and thorough, if sometimes contradictory, and she delivers it in measured, formal, grammatically flawless French. She also insists that the killing was the result not of her own depravity or instability, but the work of sorcerers and demons.Laurence’s performance, if we can call it that, has a profound, unsettling effect on Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and literary scholar who is attending the trial to gather material for a book. Like Laurence, Rama is a woman from an African background who has sought entry into the French educational elite. We first see her lecturing in a university classroom, parsing the emotional and moral meanings of a passage from Marguerite Duras’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Unlike Laurence, whose academic aspirations ended in frustration, Rama’s career is blossoming. Her latest book is selling well, and her publisher is eager for the next one.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.Jostling for Best Picture: Weighing voter buzz, box office results and more, here’s an educated guess about the likely nominees for best picture.But something — some kind of recognition or revelation — takes place in the courtroom that shakes Rama’s understanding of who she is. To say that she identifies with Laurence would be to flatten the nuances of Diop’s observant dramatic technique, and to simplify Kagame’s seething, quiet performance. Still, the parallels between Rama and Laurence are hard to miss, for the audience as well as for Rama.Rama is in the early stages of a pregnancy that she has kept secret from her mother. Laurence’s mother, Odile (Salimata Kamate) — who knew nothing of Elise’s existence, and whom Rama meets during the trial — figures it out over lunch, after scolding Rama for ordering too much food. She treats Rama, one of the only other Black women in the courtroom, as a confidante and a substitute daughter, to whom she can brag about Laurence’s erudition and elegance. She buys every newspaper with a story about the case, as if she were the proud parent of a spelling-bee champion.Odile was, we can infer, a dominant, difficult presence in her daughter’s life. She has that in common with Rama’s mother, who appears in flashbacks (played by Adama Diallo Tamba) as a remote, sorrowful, nearly silent figure. Now, plagued by ill health and crippling fatigue, she is “a broken woman,” at least according to Rama’s partner, Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery). He is a musician who provides another almost-parallel between Rama’s life and Laurence’s. Like Elise’s father, a sculptor named Luc (Xavier Maly), Adrien is a white French artist, though he is more sympathetic (and much younger) than his counterpart.Race — which is to say France’s history as a colonial power, and the uncertain present-day status of immigrants from its former colonies — is both one of the film’s themes and a part of its atmosphere. The French ideals of republican universalism, implicit in the language and rituals of the red-robed judge and the black-robed lawyers, are entangled in prejudice and custom. One of Laurence’s professors wonders why an African woman would be interested in Wittgenstein, a long-dead Austrian thinker. “Why not something closer to her own culture?”Kayije Kagame, left, as Rama, and Salimata Kamate as Odile in a scene from the film.SuperThat arrogant, insolent question ricochets toward Rama, who starts the movie contemplating Duras and later watches Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Medea,” a rendering of Euripides starring Maria Callas. What is her relationship to those European works? And what, conversely, is Africa to her, or to Laurence?These are hard questions, and Diop faces them with ardent, open-minded curiosity, resisting any obvious pronouncements about identity, individuality or universal values. Her main characters aren’t the embodiment of social problems or political failures, but both women undergo an emotional ordeal that is also a crisis of meaning, an existential conundrum that defies description, or even naming.According to Wittgenstein, “whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we be silent,” and though “Saint Omer” is a film saturated in discourse, its silences are where its deepest insight resides. The pain that connects Rama and Laurence is like a secret language, an untranslatable grammar of alienation and loss. We read it in their faces.Saint OmerNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More