Alice Diop | |
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Born | 1979 (age 44–45) Aulnay-sous-Bois, Paris, France |
Occupations |
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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]