Alice Diop | |
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 Diop in 2022 | |
| Born | 1979 (age 44–45) Aulnay-sous-Bois, Paris, France |
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| Years active | 2005–present |
Alice Diop (born 1979) is a French filmmaker. Her films include documentaries about contemporary French society and the legal drama Saint Omer (2022).
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] One of five siblings, Diop lived until age 10 in the commune's Cité des 3000 housing project. [3] [4] She studied African colonial history at the Sorbonne, visual sociology at the University of Évry, and documentary filmmaking at La Fémis. [3] [5]
Diop's first films have been described as "earnest, slightly didactic portraits of marginalized populations". [6] 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). [7] In 2011, her documentary La Mort de Danton followed an aspiring actor from Aulnay. [8]
In 2016, Diop released two films. The first, La Permanence (English title: "On Call"), takes place in a medical center for refugees in Paris. [9] 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. [10] [11] [12]
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. [6] [13] 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". [14]
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. [15] The film was inspired by the real-life trial (which Diop attended) of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese immigrant who abandoned her one-year-old daughter on a beach to die. [16] 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. [6] [16] 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. [6] [17] 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). [16] 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". [16] [18] In 2023, a panel at Slate named Saint Omer one of the 75 best movies by black directors. [19]
The César Award is the national film award of France. It is delivered in the Nuit des César ceremony and was first awarded in 1976. The nominations are selected by the members of twelve categories of filmmaking professionals and supported by the French Ministry of Culture. The nationally televised award ceremony is held in Paris each year in February. The exact location has changed over the years. It is an initiative of the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma, which was founded in 1975.
Vincent Cassel is a French actor. He has earned a César Award and a Canadian Screen Award as well as nominations for a European Film Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
François Ozon is a French film director and screenwriter.
Gaspard Thomas Ulliel was a French actor. He was known for having portrayed the young Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising (2007), fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent in the biopic Saint Laurent (2014), and for being the face of Chanel men's fragrance Bleu de Chanel for twelve years. He also voiced Jack Frost in the French version of Rise of the Guardians (2012), and portrayed Anton Mogart in the Disney+ miniseries Moon Knight (2022).
Benoît Magimel is a French actor. He was 14 when he appeared in his first film, and has starred in a variety of roles in French cinema. At age 16, Magimel left school to pursue acting as a career. In 2001, he won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his role in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher. He also starred in Claude Chabrol's La Demoiselle d'honneur.
The César Award for Most Promising Actress is one of the César Awards, presented annually by the Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma to recognize the outstanding breakthrough performance of a young actress who has worked within the French film industry during the year preceding the ceremony. Nominees and winner are selected via a run-off voting by all the members of the Académie, within a group of 16 actresses previously shortlisted by the Révélations Committee.
Bertrand Bonello is a French film director, screenwriter, producer, composer and actor. His work has been associated with the New French Extremity. He wrote and directed Something Organic (1998), The Pornographer (2001),Tiresia (2003), Cindy: The Doll Is Mine (2005), On War (2008), House of Tolerance (2011), Saint Laurent (2014), Nocturama (2016), Zombi Child (2019), Coma (2022), and The Beast (2023). He also starred in Portrait of the Artist (2015), and Titane (2021). He was nominated for the César Award for Best Director for Saint Laurent, and was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2015.
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Dominique Cabrera is a French film director. She has taught filmmaking at La Fémis and at Harvard University. Her film Nadia et les hippopotames was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. Additionally, her work has screened in the Berlinale, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Vienna International Film Festival, the Locarno Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and in the New York Film Festival, among others.
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Maman(s) (lit. 'Mom(s)/Mother(s)') is a 2015 French short drama film written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré. The film stars Sokhna Diallo, Eriq Ebouaney and Maïmouna Gueye in the lead roles. The film's plot centers on Aida, an eight-year-old girl, who is adjusting to the introduction of her father's second wife. The film was inspired by director Maïmouna Doucouré's own experiences with polygamy as a young child. The film was premiered at several international film festivals including the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, 2016 Sundance Film Festival and 2017 César Awards. The film jointly won the César Award for Best Short Film at the 42nd César Awards in February 2017 along with Alice Diop's directorial Towards Tenderness (Vers la tendresse).
The 79th annual Venice International Film Festival was held from 31 August to 10 September 2022. Noah Baumbach's White Noise was the festival's opening film, and Francesco Carrozzini's The Hanging Sun was the closing film.
Saint Omer is a 2022 French legal drama film directed by Alice Diop and starring Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanda. It is Diop's first narrative feature after working as a documentary filmmaker. In the film, Rama (Kagame) is a pregnant young novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Malanda), a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her 15-month-old child by leaving her on a beach to be swept away by the tide, in order to turn the tragic event into a literary retelling of Medea. It is based on the French court case of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted of the same crime. Diop attended Kabou's trial in 2016.
Pacifiction is a 2022 internationally co-produced drama thriller film written and directed by Albert Serra, and starring Benoît Magimel. The film premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or. The film title is a portmanteau of the words Pacific and fiction.
Rodeo is a 2022 French drama film written and directed by Lola Quivoron. The film stars Julie Ledru as Julia, a young woman living in social housing who has a poor relationship with her mother; passionate about the sport of motocross, she tries to gain the opportunity to participate in the sport by posing as a buyer on shopping websites so that she can take bikes out for test rides. As she becomes drawn deeper into the urban motocross scene, however, she begins to participate in a motorcycle theft ring.
Guslagie Malanda is a French actress and art curator. She has starred in the films My Friend Victoria (2014) and Saint Omer (2022).
Kayije Kagame is a Rwandan–Swiss contemporary artist and actress.
Fabienne Kabou is a Senegalese–French woman who was convicted of the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, Adélaïde, on 19 November 2013. She gave birth in secret and raised the child alone in Paris. Apparently mentally ill, Kabou traveled to Berck with the intention of drowning the child and left her on a beach at night, where she was found dead the next day. Kabou was quickly arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison after a trial in June 2016.
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