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Alice Diop

French filmmaker (born 1979) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alice Diop
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Alice Diop (born 1979) is a French filmmaker. Her films include documentaries about contemporary French society and the feature drama film Saint Omer (2022).

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Early life and education

Diop was born in 1979 in the northern Parisian commune of Aulnay-sous-Bois.[1][2] Her mother and father, who emigrated from Senegal in the 1960s, worked as a cleaner and an industrial painter, respectively.[3] The family had five children and lived until Diop was ten in the commune's Cité des 3000 (fr) housing project.[3][4] After her early schooling, she studied African colonial history at the Sorbonne, visual sociology at the University of Évry, and documentary filmmaking at La Fémis (workshop).[3][5][6]

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Career

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Diop's first films have been described as "earnest, slightly didactic portraits of marginalized populations".[7] Fifteen years after leaving Aulnay-sous-Bois, she returned to film the cultural diversity of the area she grew up in for her first documentary, La Tour du monde (2005).[8] In 2011, her documentary La Mort de Danton followed an aspiring actor from Aulnay.[9]

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Diop in 2017

In 2016, Diop released two films. The first, La Permanence (English title: "On Call"), takes place in a medical center for refugees in Paris.[10] The second documentary that year, Vers la tendresse ("Towards Tenderness"), features interviews with four young men talking about masculinity and the difficulty of finding love and intimacy.[11][12][13]

Diop's next documentary, Nous ("We"), came out in 2020. Centering on suburban life along the RER B rail line outside Paris, it marked a broadening of Diop's subject to a wider breadth of French society.[7][14] Selecting it as a Critic's Pick, The New York Times wrote that the film "points to the impossibility of portraiture itself, whether of a life, a people or a nation".[15]

Saint Omer, Diop's first feature film, premiered in 2022 at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for a debut film.[16] The film was inspired by the trial (which Diop attended) of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese immigrant who abandoned her one-year-old daughter on a beach to die.[17] Fascinated by the high-profile case, Diop recalled deciding to make a film about it during the trial's closing arguments, when she and others in the courtroom were visibly moved.[7][17]

The script, co-written with Amrita David and Marie NDiaye, significantly borrows from court transcripts but tells the story through the lens of a courtroom observer (played by Kayije Kagame) analogous to Diop.[7][18] Saint Omer was highly acclaimed; director Céline Sciamma described it as a "cinema poem" akin to Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).[17] A. O. Scott of The New York Times, naming the film a Critic's Pick, called it an "intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling—literary, legal or cinematic—to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience".[17][19] In 2023, a panel at Slate named Saint Omer one of the 75 best movies by black directors.[20]

In June 2024, Diop signed a petition addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron demanding France to officially recognize the State of Palestine.[21]

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Filmography

  • La Tour du monde (2005) – documentary
  • Clichy pour l'exemple (2005) – documentary
  • Les Sénégalaises et la sénégauloise (2007) – documentary
  • La Mort de Danton (2011) – documentary
  • La Permanence (2016) – documentary
  • Vers la tendresse (2016) – documentary
  • Nous (2020) – documentary
  • Saint Omer (2022) – feature film

Awards

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References

External links

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