Raised in a Paris banlieue, the documentary-maker is now in the spotlight thanks to her Venice prize-winning first feature, based on the true story of a woman accused of killing her baby
have a voice that doesn’t carry very well,” says French film-maker Alice Diop, when I tell her I can’t quite hear what she’s saying. We meet in a cafe near her home in the working-class district of Montreuil, on the eastern edge of Paris. It is busy with lunch parties, and the combination of Diop’s French – she speaks fast and quietly – with the occasional crashes of crockery isn’t ideal for discussing the complex, challenging new film she has made.
Still, if Diop’s speech doesn’t carry acoustically, it’s a different matter with her artistic voice. After a significant career as a documentary-maker, Diop’s feature film debut,, is resonating worldwide. It won two awards at the Venice film festival last year and was France’s entry for the best international feature at the Academy Awards, making Diop the first black woman ever to represent France in the Oscar race. Diop is suddenly in the spotlight in a way she never imagined.
“I feel ambivalent about it,” she says. “For 15 years, I’ve been making films from the margins, with a political intention of filming those margins – the, people who have been silenced, because those are the people I come from. That’s my territory, my history.“I make cinema because I have certain obsessions – not to be visible, but because I need to. I’m constantly questioning this new position I’m in.
The script – which Diop wrote with her regular collaborator and editor Amrita David and the Goncourt-winning novelist Marie NDiaye – directly uses the words that were spoken in court, which Diop would write down from memory after each session.
“I didn’t want Guslagie to imitate Fabienne,” says Diop. “She takes Laurence in a more human, tragic direction – she’s much more empathic than the real Fabienne Kabou, who stayed extremely cold throughout the trial.” The performances are all the more striking in that Diop had never previously directed actors. As Malanda tells me later, Diop wasn’t after conventional expressive acting. “She wanted it to be absolutely unspectacular, with a sort of formal reserve.
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