"Saint Omer" written by Gregory Mann

(Saint Omer • 2022 ‧ Legal drama ‧ 2h 2m • Showtimes London Wed 25 Jan

Vue Cinema London - West End (Leicester Square), 500 m·Leicester Square, 3 Cranbourn Street, LONDON WC2H 7AL, United Kingdom, 19:45

Vue Cinemas, 3,4 km·Islingto, 36 Parkfield Street, LONDON N1 0PS, United Kingdom, 19:45

Vue, 5,6 km·Fulham Road, Fulham Broadway Retail Centre, LONDON SW6 1BW, United Kingdom, 19:45

Vue, 5,9 km·West Hampstead, 02 Centre - Finchley Road, LONDON NW3 6LU, United Kingdom, 19:45

Vue Cinema London - Shepherd's bush, 6,4 km·Shepherds Bush Gree, West 12 Shopping and Leisure Centre, LONDON W12 8PP, United Kingdom, 19:45

Vue Cinema Shepherd's Bush (Westfield),,6,6 km·Ariel Way - Westfield Shopping Centre, LONDON W12 7GF, United Kingdom, 19:45)

"Saint Omer"

Saint Omer court of law. Young novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) attends the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanga), a young woman accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter by abandoning her to the rising tide on a beach in northern France. But as the trial continues, the words of the accused and witness testimonies will shake Rama’s convictions and call into question our own judgement.

For "Saint Omer" the obsession comes from a photo published in Le Monde in 2015. It’s a black and white image, taken by a surveillance camera, a black woman, at Gare du Nord, pushes a pram with a mixed-race baby all wrapped up. Two days before, a baby had been found in Berck-sur-Mer, carried by the waves, at six in the morning. No one knew who this child was, journalists and investigators thought perhaps a migrant boat that had drifted off course. Investigators had found a stroller in a thicket in Berck-sur-Mer, and from there, by studying surveillance camera footage, had traced it back to this black woman with the mixed-race baby. A few days later, we learn that she's a Senegalese woman, Fabienne Kabou, and she has killed her baby by leaving it at high tide on the beach. She has confessed; we listen to her barrister, and immediately the question of witchcraft is mentioned. We learn that she's a PhD student, an intellectual, the first comments from the press highlight her exceptional IQ of 150, yet she said her aunts in Senegal cast a spell on her, which would explain what she’s done. Why everyone is making such a big deal out of the fact that sees extremely well-spoken, she’s an academic after all.

The trial took place in 2016. How to describe this crazy act of going to the trial of a woman who has killed her 15-month-old mixed-race baby, like the character of Rama at the beginning of the film, we walk through the city from the train station to the hotel. We feel people looking at us, people stare at me from their windows, people in the street turn away. This image which could have been of a thriller, or horror movie, is in this film. Her birth is an act of justice. An act of justice was served on everything she went through, on her entire life, not just on the murder committed by her mother. Justice was done for her. The whole film is a combination of the two women’s tears, a black woman and a white woman, each of us crying for something different yet also for something in common.

To offer the black body the possibility of saying the universal. Our intimacy is not quite yet considered as being able to speak to the intimacy of the other. We've the feeling that this dialogue is not yet envisaged. The exchange is only too rarely done in that direction. There's a desire to inscribe their silence, to repair their invisibility. It’s also one of the political aims of the film. And to talk about what mothers we're made from, what baggage, what heritage, what pains. From what silence, from the void of exile, their exile, the void of our mothers lives, the nothingness of their tears, the nothingness of their violence, we tried to compose our own lives. It tries to answer questions with which all women are confronted, while simultaneously speaking specifically about one of the aspects of the history of immigration. The narrative is to record this skin, these bodies, in a place where they're still barely visible. That’s what’s contemporary, moving from off-screen to the center of the image, but with an aesthetic power.

The aesthetic of the film is political. There's a connection between justice and the aesthetic question of correctness. That narrative doesn’t restore her power, including that which is more shadowy, dark, violent. Paradoxically, it’s the confrontation between this primary lyrical reading and the documentary reality of the actual trial that helped us think about our mise-en-scène on this story. In the film, the mise-en-scène replaces the lyrical dimension, allowing us to access the story, cleanse it from its sordid, listenable, unthinkable nature, it’s the mise-en-scène that allows to look into the pit of this story and to draw from it a greater knowledge, a greater understanding of ourselves, to forgive her, to forgive all mothers, all our mothers. It’s the story of Rama that makes this possible, in the identification it allows the viewer. Without her, this fictional character, it would have been nothing more than the story of a banal and tragic news item, and the film would be no better than a cinematic version of the French TV show 'Bring In The Accused'. In terms of mise-en-scène, we see a boundary between fiction and documentary.

Written by Gregory Mann