"Saint Omer" is in the Competition for the Golden Lion at the 79th annual Venice International Film Festival on 7 September 2022
"Saint Omer" is a 2022 French film directed by Alice Diop, one of the most outstanding international awards winning African documentary filmmakers. The world premiere is at the on going 79th annual Venice International Film Festival.
The film is starring Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. Its is Diop's first narrative feature producing multiple award winning documentary films.
In the film, 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 by the tide, in order to turn the tragic event into a literary retelling of Medea.
"Saint Omer" is also in the Official Selections of the 2022 annual Toronto International Film Festival and the 2022 New York Film Festival before the theatrical release in France in November 2022.
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DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
In June 2016, I attended the trial of a woman who killed her baby daughter by dropping her off at high tide on a beach in France. I imagined that she wanted to offer her to the ‘sea’, a more powerful ‘mother’ than she could be. Inspired by a true story, but fueled by an imagination that summoned mythological figures, I wrote this film: the story of a young novelist who attends the trial of an infanticidal mother with the aim of writing a contemporary version of the Medea myth. But nothing will happen as she had planned. The opacity of the accused will constantly return her to her own ambiguity about motherhood. It is a film that I wanted to make to probe the unspeakable mystery of mothers.
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