In 2016, Alice Diop set out to the northern French town of Saint Omer to attend the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese woman accused of killing her baby girl. The French media was enraptured by the crime; the details made for a textbook fait divers, a sensational news item spun by journalists desperate to satiate their scandal-starved readers. Yet, as the trial unfolded, Kabou and her actions remained distant and impenetrable; her case became a kind of mockery of our legal systems, reliant as they are on classification and concrete truths to administer justice. At every turn, Kabou defied expectations: she was an educated woman, beautifully articulate and poised even as she repeatedly tweaked her story depending, it seemed, on her mood. Baffled by her own decision to abandon her daughter on a beach, she claimed to be the victim of a voodoo spell. She claimed to love her.
Diop has no interest in “solving” the case of Fabienne Kabou. In Saint Omer, she reimagines the trial from the perspective of an individual likely unconsidered or ignored by the French media: a Black academic and writer, Rama (Kayije Kagame), whose own anxieties around motherhood and inheritance are exacerbated by the story of Laurence Koly (Guslagie Malanda), Diop’s version of Kabou.
The first-generation daughter of Senegalese immigrants herself, Diop has long explored the frictions of modern French identity from the perspective of the marginalized: immigrants from former French colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia, and their children, often raised in the multiethnic urban peripheries, or outside of Paris, where Diop herself was born. Her earlier documentaries unravelled bitter political realities from specific experiences and contexts: in (2011), an aspiring actor from the working-class suburbs contends with the creative poverty of an artistic field dominated primarily by white people; in (2016), refugees divulge their hardships and desires during appointments at a migrant medical centre. (2020), Diop’s canvas is larger. She traverses Paris along the RER B, a sprawling commuter rail that passes from the northern-most extreme of the city to the south, and meets up with everyday people: a mechanic from Mali; neighbourhood kids sliding down hills on scraps of cardboard; her sister, who is a home-visit nurse for the elderly. , in its loosely limned structure, and in the declarative punch of its title, is Diop’s grandest statement of intent: it bridges the divide between the centre and the periphery, the dominant and the marginal, urging us to build solidarities more profound than those premised on the politics of relatability. takes these principles and spins them into something like a ghost story in which mothers and daughters are haunted by one another.
