Saint Omer, the True Crime Movie That Tackles Motherhood and Migration

In 2013, a Senegalese girl travelled 150 miles from Paris to a seaside city within the Pas-de-Calais division of France, breastfed her child on the seaside, and left her to drown because the tide got here in. What turned often known as “l’affaire Fabienne Kabou” quickly gripped the nation, together with documentarian Alice Diop, who first realized of the case when she noticed Kabou’s image in Le Monde, captured on CCTV on the Gare du Nord together with her child simply hours earlier than she deserted her.

“I don’t know why, however I instantly felt very aware of this girl,” says Diop, a Paris-born, first-generation Senegalese filmmaker whose work to this point brings tales from the margins of French society to the fore. “I had this instinct she was from Senegal, which was confirmed a number of days later when she confessed to the homicide. We have been additionally roughly the identical age, and I had a mixed-race baby myself, though they have been of various ages. And that’s how I developed the obsession for this story.”

The extra she learn in regards to the case, the extra Diop felt “mesmerised”. The academically gifted Fabienne had moved to Paris to check legislation, later switching to philosophy in a transfer that noticed her lower off financially from her mother and father and unable to proceed her research. Later, she entered right into a relationship with an older white man, whom she claimed saved her hidden away from family and friends, and fell pregnant. When her daughter was born she exhibited indicators of postnatal despair, refusing to go away the home until she was a minimum of six months outdated. It was on this mind-set, unable to sleep and experiencing hallucinations, that she took a practice to the resort city of Berck.

“When she was requested why she’d killed her baby she used this sentence, which was utterly unusual however on the similar time very lyrical,” says Diop. “[She said,] ‘I left my child on the seaside with the tide coming in so the ocean might carry away her physique,’ nearly as if she was so utterly indifferent from the act that it [took on] a kind of legendary dimension.” Mystified by this obvious lack of feeling – she stated she returned dwelling to Paris the following day as if she’d “simply been purchasing” – Kabou informed police she thought she’d been influenced by “witchcraft”.

Decided to dive deeper, Diop travelled to Saint-Omer for Kabou’s trial in 2016. The occasions that unfolded there kind the idea of Saint Omer, the director’s looking out and poetic fiction-feature debut, overlaying the story of Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist trying to flip the case into a contemporary retelling of the Medea delusion. Quickly, although, Rama finds herself overwhelmed by Laurence’s incapacity to account for her actions, which sparks painful ruminations on her personal fears as an expectant mum, and her strained relationship together with her mom. Via these girls’s tales, Diop is free to put some heavy truths on the viewer about motherhood, and emotions of guilt and abandonment amid migrant communities.

As a first-generation Senegalese migrant drawn to put in writing in regards to the case, it’s tempting to map Rama’s story within the movie onto Diop’s personal. The director has used parts of autobiography in her work earlier than, notably in Nous (2020), the place she juxtaposed a examine of disadvantaged suburbs alongside Paris’s RER B commuter line with outdated home-video footage of her household. It’s an assumption Diop swats away with a touch of irritation. “I don’t know why I’m requested this [so often] – if it’s as a result of I’m a Black girl or if it’s as a result of I’m a documentary maker – however I appear to be denied the suitable to have the ability to make a fictional work,” she says. “This can be a fictional film, and Rama is a fictional character. She’s not the transcription of my very own private expertise or of my life.”

Diop movies the trial scenes in lengthy, lingering takes that always fall silent save for the creaking of the courtroom furnishings. The impact is hypnotic, forcing the viewer to hunt for clues within the smallest of appears. Because the accused (renamed as Laurence within the movie), actress Guslagie Malanda wears an expression all through that appears a masks of profound sorrow, remorse and traces of one thing else – is it anger? Perhaps even defiance? In a single exceptional second, her gaze alights on Rama within the public gallery, and she or he offers her a short smile that brings tears to the author’s eyes, later inflicting her to interrupt down. How does Diop interpret the look?

“This can be a query I’m usually requested and that I truly refuse to reply,” says the director, a ‘subsequent query’ klaxon sounding reproachfully in my head for the second time in the present day. “My intention within the movie was to go away the viewers free to really feel and meditate primarily based on their very own biographies and sensitivities. And naturally, every particular person could have a unique interpretation that’s as related as my very own. Even amongst individuals who have lived comparable experiences [as Rama and Laurence], individuals who have lived in exile or Black folks, Black girls, there will be such a palette of reactions it might not be honest for me to one way or the other attempt to impose my very own.”

After all, the query of why Laurence/Fabienne did what she did should stay a thriller, a reality that Diop honours in her movie by linking her story to the Greek delusion of Medea. In any case, what’s a delusion however an try to elucidate phenomena that lie exterior the realms of human comprehension? Confronted with such thriller we inevitably flip, as Rama does within the movie, to our personal lives. “It’s like [French cultural theorist] André Malraux stated,” Diop explains, “‘Whenever you need to perceive somebody you don’t choose, and while you choose somebody, you don’t perceive.’”