“Like in a great novel where you become engaged in understanding why it happened or how it happened, rather than be focused just on the horrible crime.” “The greatness of her vocabulary and her expression allowed her to create a distance with the crime that she committed,” Diop adds. She’s a bit like an alien with this language.” And in the case of Fabienne Kabou, it’s clearly a style she gives to herself. “Because of the colonization by the French in Africa, the French they speak is not everyday French,” Malanda explains. Jafar Panahi’s “No Bears,” Todd Field’s “Tár” and Joanna Hogg’s “The Eternal Daughter” are among our critic’s favorite films of the year. Movies The best movies of 2022 - and where to find them Malanda says Diop encouraged her to speak as if she was reading Marguerite Duras. Diop wanted to preserve that in the film, which resulted in 20-minute, one-shot takes of Malanda embodying Kabou’s actual testimony. In fact, during Kabou’s trial, which resulted in a 20-year prison sentence, many remarked on her unique quality of speech and unusual cadence. Diop was particularly interested in working with NDiaye because she felt that Kabou’s story had a novel-like sensibility. She adds that including fictionalized aspects “allowed us to explore all these questions inside the documentary part of the film.”ĭiop co-wrote “Saint Omer” with the film’s editor, Amrita David, and Marie NDiaye, a well-known French novelist and playwright. The film was born of the texture of that exchange and the quality of that dialogue that I could not have made up even if I was the greatest dialogist.” “ style of language and her interaction with the prosecutor and the people in the court was so amazing to me, and that is in the film also. “Everything that happened as far as the trial is concerned is practically a verbatim transcript of the trial,” Diop explains, speaking over Zoom with the help of a translator. Laurence is, in essence, Kabou, while Rama is a fictional conduit for Diop herself. ![]() ![]() Shot over three weeks in the actual town of Saint-Omer, the film follows a literature professor named Rama (Kayije Kagame) who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda). The resulting film, “Saint Omer,” is somewhere between fiction and documentary. But after the trial ended, she decided to explore Kabou’s story through a dramatic lens. It brought up fundamental questions about race and French colonialism, as well as the most obvious one: How could a mother kill her own child? Until then, Diop, who was born in France to Senegalese parents, had made only documentary films. The story of a Senegalese immigrant, at odds with her own mother, resonated deeply with the filmmaker. ![]() That’s my default explanation because I have no other.”Īt the time, Diop was pregnant. When asked why she committed the crime, Kabou simply said, “Witchcraft. For one week, Diop sat in a courtroom in the French town of Saint-Omer and listened as Kabou described leaving Adélaïde on the beach of Berck-sur-Mer, where her body would be swallowed by the waves and later discovered by a fisherman. In 2016, filmmaker Alice Diop attended the trial of Fabienne Kabou, who had admitted to killing her 15-month-old daughter, Adélaïde.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |