St. Omer Film Screening

Rama (Kayije Kagame), a successful journalist and author living in Paris, has come to Saint Omer, a town in the north of France, to attend the trial of a young Senegalese woman, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), who allegedly murdered her baby daughter. Although she admits to killing the child, she cannot or will not provide motivation, claiming it was a kind of sorcery out of her control. Rama’s plan to write about Laurence in a book inspired by the Medea myth increasingly unravels as she becomes overwhelmed by the case and reckons with memories of her immigrant mother and her own impending motherhood.

Saint Omer is France’s 2023 Oscars entry. It made the Oscar Shortlist for Best International Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards. It won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize and the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award. It was awarded the César in 2023 for Best First Feature Film.

Click here to watch the trailer

Alice Diop is a director of Senegalese descent with a Masters in history and a Doctorate in visual sociology. She studied documentary filmmaking at La Fémis in Paris and has written and directed several documentaries. Her 2020 documentary, Nous, won the Encounters Award at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival. Saint Omer is her first fiction film.

Maboula Soumahoro is an Associate Professor at the University of Tours and President of the Black History Month Association (Paris). A specialist in Africana Studies, she has taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France and was most recently the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta.