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 feature drama film 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] The family had five children and lived until Diop was ten in the commune's Cité des 3000 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. [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 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Dahomey is a 2024 documentary film directed by Mati Diop. It is a dramatised account of 26 royal treasures from the Kingdom of Dahomey, which were held in a museum in France. The film explores how the artifacts were returned from France to Benin, and the reactions of Beninese people.
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