Saint Omer

In this extraordinary narrative from acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop, a young writer confronts her personal trauma as she watches the trial of a woman accused of killing her own child. For ten years, award-winning documentarian Alice Diop has focused her camera's eye on the injustice and personal stories of various immigrant communities on the outskirts of Paris. In her stunning debut in the field of feature film, the director tells the story with her typical sensitivity and demandingness, loosely adapted from a report published in 2013 in the column black chronicle. The young woman then allegedly abandoned her 15-month-old daughter on a beach in northern France as the tide was coming in, leaving her to fend for herself. This increasingly claustrophobic courtroom drama is told with stoic perspective by Rama (played with restrained intensity by the excellent Kayije Kagame), a young writer working on a contemporary retelling of the ancient myth of Medea. Rama is pregnant herself and her initial unease, dismal family history, doubts and fears about motherhood gradually fade away as the life story of accused Laurence Cola (played by the exceptional Guslagie Malanda) is revealed. Her experiences - starting with a cruel childhood in Senegal and ending with the gradual alienation from family and society after arriving in Europe - evoke in her the traumas of racism and emotional manipulation, which may remain unspoken, but can nevertheless destroy us insidiously and irreversibly.