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Alice Diop’s Saint Omer brings the French filmmaker into the realm of fiction for the first time, but preserves her documentary respect for the evidence of the audience’s eyes. A sober, pared-down courtroom drama, Saint Omer initially makes little effort to comment on its action, at times feeling more like presentation than representation. The unadorned quality of the film can be laborious, particularly in the early stretches of the trial that’s at the center of the story, but Diop earns the effort she asks of her audience, methodically allowing a strange, intangible, but nevertheless palpable mix of emotions to emerge from the situation itself.

It’s certainly a choice, and the expression of an ethos, that Diop keeps the viewer locked in to repeating pairs of alternating camera angles for significant portions of the trial. We see the defendant, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant and...

Saint Omer Review — Saint Omer (2022) Film Review, a movie directed by Alice Diop, written by Amrita David and Alice Diop and starring Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Xavier Maly, Thomas de Pourquery, Salimata Kamate, Robert Cantarella, Aurelia Petit and Louise Lemoine Torres. Alice Diop’s heavy but absorbing dramatic French film, Saint Omer, is certainly [...]

Continue reading: Film Review: Saint Omer (2022): Filmmaker Alice Diop’s Courtroom Drama is Captivating and Marvelously Acted...

This review originally ran September 7, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

“A woman who has killed her baby can’t really expect any sympathy,” says Laurence Coly, who is accused of that very crime, in celebrated documentarian Alice Diop’s narrative debut “Saint Omer,” making its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. So, the logical question is: Why would anyone watch such a film? Fortunately, Diop gives us many reasons.

Diop — whose 2021 documentary “We” (“Nous”), revolving around Black immigrant communities in the Paris suburbs, won top honors at the Berlin International Film Festival — doesn’t abandon her nonfiction roots. Truth also fuels her feature film. In it, well-spoken, educated Senegalese immigrant Laurence Coly, like the real Fabienne Kabou only a few years back, stands trial in quaint Saint-Omer in northeastern France for killing her 15-month-old daughter.

There to capture it all is pregnant...