Saint Omer (film)

Saint Omer is a 2022 French legal drama film written and directed by Alice Diop, and starring Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. It is Diop's first narrative feature. Her other films have been documentaries.

Rama (Kagame) is a pregnant young novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Malanda), a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old child by leaving her on a beach to be swept away. Rama imagines writing about the event as a literary retelling of the Greek tragedy Medea.

The film is based on the French court case of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted in 2016 of murdering her infant by drowning. Diop attended Kabou's trial.

The film premiered in-competition at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on 7 September 2022, where it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize, along with the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award. Additional screenings were held at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and the 2022 New York Film Festival before theatrical release in France on 23 November 2022. The film was selected as the French entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards, and made the December shortlist. The film received the Grand Prix for Best Film at Film Fest Gent in 2022.

Plot
Rama, a literature professor and novelist, travels from Paris to Saint-Omer to observe the trial of Laurence Coly and write about the case. Coly is a graduate student and Senegalese immigrant who is charged in the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, having left her on a beach to be drowned by the tide in Berck.

Rama is four-months pregnant herself and, like Coly, is in a mixed-race relationship. She also has a complex relationship with her own Senegalese immigrant mother, and feels a personal connection to Coly. She plans to write a modern day retelling of the Greek Medea myth in her treatment of the case. As she learns more about Coly's life and the isolation Coly suffered from her family and society while studying and living in France, Rama becomes increasingly anxious about her own life and her pregnancy.

The film cuts before the outcome of the trial is announced. It shows Rama's return to Paris, and her spending time with her mother.

Cast

 * Kayije Kagame as Rama
 * Guslagie Malanda as Laurence Coly
 * Valérie Dréville as The Judge
 * Aurélia Petit as Defence Barrister Vaudenay
 * Xavier Maly as Luc Dumontet, Coly's partner
 * Robert Canterella as Barrister
 * Salimata Kamate as Odile Diata
 * Thomas de Pourquery as Adrian, Rama's partner
 * Salih Sigirci as Salih
 * Fatih Sahin as Fatih
 * Atillahan Karagedik as Jackson
 * Ege Güner as Ege Güner
 * Mustili as Mustafa
 * Lionel Top as Journalist

Production
Saint Omer is based on the 2016 court case of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted of killing her daughter in 2013, in the same way as Coly. Diop followed the case and immediately recognized Kabou's features from news footage as being Senegalese, which is Diop's family heritage. Diop attended the trial and became "obsessed" with the case, noting that most of the attendees and participants at the trial were also women. Diop elaborated that she "wanted to find answers to my own intimate questions that I had asked myself about my relationship with my own mother and being a mother myself. And I decided that since I shared those same emotions with so many women, if we were all so obsessed with that event, it meant there was something universal in the story, which had to do with motherhood. So I decided to make a film about it." Like Rama, Diop was pregnant with her first child while attending the trial. Diop said that she attended the trial out of "intuition" and did not decide to make a film about it until after the trial ended. Having only made documentary films, Diop made her narrative feature film debut because cameras were not allowed in the courtroom and she "wanted to recreate my experience of listening to another woman's story while interrogating myself, facing my own difficult truths."

Court-transcripts were partially used to write the screenplay. While writing the script, Diop first met actresses Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. She was immediately impressed with both women and thought of them while still writing the script. She later contacted both Kagame and Malanda to audition. Diop has said she has been influenced by the work of Marguerite Duras. In the film, the character Rama is seen lecturing about Duras.

Filming took six weeks. Both the cast and crew were mostly female, which "wasn't fully deliberate, nor was it wholly accidental" according to Diop. Filming took place between May and July 2021 in the Île-de-France and Hauts-de-France regions, including in the commune of Saint-Omer. Guslagie Malanda, who played the role based on Kabou, found being in character so taxing that she had nightmares for a year. Diop fainted on set when the shooting wrapped.

Release
Saint Omer was initially considered for the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. It premiered at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on 7 September 2022, where it won the Grand Jury Prize along with the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award.

Critical reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 94% based on 131 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's consensus reads, "A gut-punching contemplation of a woman's immigrant experience, Saint Omer puts a mother on the stand and the audience in the jury box to find humanity in the inhumane." According to Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average score of 91 out of 100 based on 36 critics, the film received "universal acclaim".

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it "Intellectually galvanizing and emotionally harrowing, the story explores motherhood, race and postcolonial France with control, lucidity and compassion."

In September 2022 it was selected as France's official selection for Best International Film at the 95th Academy Awards.