Saint Omer is a 2022 French legal drama film directed by Alice Diop and starring Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. It is Diop's first narrative feature after working as a documentary filmmaker. 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. It is based on the French court case of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted of the same crime. Diop attended Kabou's trial in 2016.
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 the 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.
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 student and Senegalese immigrant accused of leaving her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to be swept away by the tide in Berck. Rama, who is four-months pregnant herself and, like Coly, is in a mixed-race relationship and also has a complex relationship with her own Senegalese immigrant mother, feels a personal connection to Coly. She plans to write a modern day retelling of the Greek Medea myth about the case. As she learns more about Coly's life and the isolation Coly experienced from her family and society while 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, instead showing Rama return to Paris.
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."