Saint Omer

After years of documentary work, Alice Diop drew her first fiction feature from a real case: in 2016 a woman in France stood trial for killing her infant daughter by leaving her to the incoming tide. Diop attended the hearings herself and built the film largely inside the courtroom, in long takes that rarely cut away. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a novelist who comes to watch the trial while writing a book about Medea. Guslagie Malanda plays the accused, Laurence Coly, who gives her testimony in calm, precise, academic French, and it is precisely that composure the room cannot metabolise. Rama is pregnant, estranged from her own mother, and the longer she listens the more she finds herself in the dock. The film won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Luigi De Laurentiis award for best debut at Venice in 2022. Diop supplies no answer. She shows instead how comfortable the refusal to understand can be. Who it is for: viewers who value patient cinema that treats a courtroom as a space for listening rather than a thriller engine. Who it is not for: anyone wanting fast cutting, scored emotion or a clear verdict.