Saint Omer

Alice Diop’s first venture into narrative after more than a decade of documentary filmmaking, Saint Omer follows a young novelist, Rama (Kayije Kagame), who is observing the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a woman accused of murdering her fifteen-month-old child in northern France. Based on a real-life 2016 trial in the French town the film borrows its title from, Diop’s haunting retelling is nuanced and charged with provocations about motherhood, immigration, and abandonment. “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” (A.O. Scott, New York Times).