Saint Omer
Gripping and atypical courtroom drama about a pregnant journalist reporting on the trial of a Senegalese young woman who has allegedly murdered her own baby daughter.
In Greek mythology, Medea kills her children to take revenge on her adulterous husband. In SAINT OMER, we follow Rama, a pregnant journalist working on a book about Medea. The research for her book takes her to Saint Omer, where she attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a philosophy student from Senegal who is on trial for the murder of her baby. During her trial, she pleads guilty but claims she was bewitched. For Rama, the woman’s almost imperceptible act evokes all sorts of elusive ghosts from her own past, and she comes to the shocking discovery that she has much in common with Laurence.
SAINT OMER is the feature debut of celebrated documentary filmmaker Alice Diop. The film is based on a French court case against a woman who left her infant to drown in the rising tide of the beach. Diop based the screenplay almost entirely on the transcripts of that court case. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it also won the award for best debut feature.