“My films are cut through with the need to resist the violence of our times,” Alice Diop tells Visions du Reel audience

The violence surrounding the death of 17 year-old Nahel Merzouk in Nanterre, western Paris, last June has silenced Alice Diop.

“I was left speechless,” said Diop, the highly-regarded documentary filmmaker and director of the Oscar-nominated, Silver Lion-winning drama Saint Omer. “It took away my voice, and almost a year later, I still haven’t found it.”

Merzouk was shot dead by a policeman in the 92nd district, and protests soon spread to Diop’s home in the 93rd, Seine-Saint-Denis, and Aulnay-sous-Bois, the arrondissiment in which Diop was born  in Paris to Senegalese immigrants in 1979.

“I’m living at the heart of political issues being raised in France,” she told a packed masterclass at the Visions du Reel festival in Nyon, Switzerland this weekend. “My whole life is being shaped by what is happening. I’m the mother of a 15 year-old Black son in an under-privileged neighbourhood whose school has been closed for the last six weeks because of strikes. My only way to not go crazy is to remove myself from the discourse.

“But I know the time I’m taking now will be to make sure what I do next is strong enough to resist the violence of our times. It will allow me to shape an object that stands the test of time, which won’t be swept away by the news cycle, Racism cuts through all my films but what is it? It’s intangible. It’s not a sentence, it’s not a punch, it’s an existence. I’ve interrogated this in all my films: each is different but they’re cut through with the need to resist.”

Diop’s slow emergence as a voice who relentlessly interrogates the very fabric of the presentation of modern French society was accelerated by her narrative debut Saint Omer in 2022. Suddenly, this singular filmmaker was catapulted to the forefront of discourse with this real life-based story of the trial of a Senegalese woman who committed infanticide. It won two awards at Venice - the Silver Lion and the Lion of the Future - and was nominated for an Oscar, making the international shortlist. 

There have been no firm details of a follow-up, either documentary or narrative. “I’ve never made a film that was seen as much as Saint Omer,” she told the audience. “It was shown in over 40 countries. My audience multiplied 100 times.

“But it was a surprise, not a strategy. It couldn’t have been made as a documentary so it had to be a fiction. I’ll go back to documentaries, My aim is to find the right format for the film I want to make, and yet I understand so much better now that what I make determines how it will be seen.”

Saint Omer was developed far from traditional narrative filmmaking in that Diop cast her actors “based on my intuition and desire to film these people and see how their reaction would alter my film. It was extremely linked to the cast, born out of me being a documentary film-maker.”

Screen has reported on Diop’s next film being a narrative feature, although she has recently taken a position as a visiting professor at Harvard and is working with the Pompidou Centre on La Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde (“the ideal cinematheque for the world’s suburbs”), an initiative to advocate for filmmakers from the peripheries - including filmmakers from the past who have been ignored in the ‘canon’.

Providing a testament

Diop’s academic background is storied. While her parents were working-class migrants - a cleaner and a painter, who appear in family footage in her 2020 Encounters-winning documentary We (Nous) - she studied African colonial history at the Sorbonne, visual sociology at Evry for her Masters, and documentary film-making at La Femis. Her very first documentary works reflected the representation of the Black body and the Black face, culminating in La Mort D’Anton and La Tendresse, the Cesar award-winning short of 2016 which examined the attitudes of young men in the banlieues where she had grown up.

Her first feature-length documentary, released in 2016, was On Call (La Permanence), set in a refugee medical centre in Seine-Saint-Denis, where a doctor tried to repair the bodies of desperate migrants only for it to become increasingly clear it was their minds that had been destroyed. 

On Call reflects a unique attitude to film-making which is completely outside the normal bounds (We, for example, happened after she was abused at a rally in support of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo terror attack by extreme right-wingers who felt she had no right to be there). She heard about the Seine-Saint-Denis centre, a now-shuttered initiative, from one doctor for refugees without papers, and went there for over a year, she told the Visions du Reel audience: first as an observer in the waiting room, then recording audio of the consultations. Upset by the futility of one appointment - a woman who had been trafficked and was trying to flee prostitution - she came to understand that the part she had to play in their stories was in providing a testament. (In much the same way, she attended the trial which was fictionalised in Saint Omer before she ever realised she’d make a film about it.)

Today she realises that On Call is more relevant now than it was in release (and how, from the final testament of an abused South African refugee with a small baby, the thread to Saint Omer was first spun.) She recalled showing it as part of a political debate with members of France’s hard right in attendance. “I saw they were forced to look at the faces onscreen, the discourse, the setting, and I realised that was violent,” she says. “I understood for the first time that my films could be violent. And the audience were silent. There was no debate. I’ve seen that a lot with my films. It’s a way of scoring a win.

“So for me, cinema is more powerful than ever,” she explains. “I don’t think it will stop Marine Le Pen from coming to power, but it helps us resist.”

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