Guest
In this extraordinary narrative debut by acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop, a young novelist is forced to confront her personal traumas as she observes the trial of a woman accused of infanticide. For the past decade, award-winning documentarian Alice Diop has turned her camera on the injustices and intimate stories of immigrant communities on the peripheries of Paris in a meaningful act of recentring. With Saint Omer, her astonishing narrative feature debut, she brings her typical sensitivity and rigour to a story liberally adapted from a 2013 fait divers, in which a woman allegedly placed her 15-month-old daughter on a beach in northern France, abandoning her to the high tide. This progressively claustrophobic courtroom drama is told through the stoic point of view of Rama (played with restrained intensity by a superb Kayije Kagame), a young novelist working on a contemporary retelling of the ancient Medea myth. Pregnant herself and increasingly uneasy, Rama’s own family history, doubts, and
