Interview with Alice Diop at Villa Medici
Monday 5 December 2022
Interview with the director Alice Diop for the Italian premiere of her film Saint Omer at Villa Medici.
Discover the interview:
Villa Medici had the honour of presenting Saint Omer again on Monday 5 December, the first feature film of the director Alice Diop, already screened at the second edition of the Villa Medici Film Festival. She tackles the unimaginable, infanticide, examining the mysteries of this act with great sensitivity and intelligence in the fascinating film.
The film won the Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize and the Lion of the Future – Luigi De Laurentiis Prize at the Venice Film Festival 2022. It also represents France in the Best International Film category at the 2023 Oscars.
The relationship between fiction and documentary, women figures in the film, the influence of literature on her practice, Alice Diop gives us in this interview the keys to understanding the way Saint Omer was conceived and more widely explains her view of cinema.
Synopsis:
Saint-Omer court. Rama, a 30-year-old novelist, attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a young woman accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter after abandoning her on a northern French beach in the face of the rising tide. Rama intends to turn this case into a contemporary version of the Medea myth, but in the course of the trial, the writer is led to question the truth of her own experience of motherhood.
2022, France, 118′
With: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga, Fatih Sahin
Producer: SRAB FILMS
This projection has been organised in collaboration with the Italien distributor Minerva Pictures.
BIOGRAPHY
Images credits:
Cover image: © Laurent Le Crabe
Portrait of Alice Diop: © Cyrille Choupas
Video credits:
Director and editor: Pier Tommaso Carrescia
Photographs of Saint Omer: © Srab Films / © Laurent le Crabe
Photography of Villa Medici: © Daniele Molajoli