A year after French Audrey Diwan won the Golden Lion for the Event, another French filmmaker, Alice Diop, did a great job in Venice. This Saturday, she scored twice by winning the Grand Jury Prize and the first film prize for her first fiction, Saint Omer, inspired by a news item and the trial that followed. “, said the filmmaker, very moved, receiving her award and highlighting her feminist fight, in particular that of “women of color”: “Silence will not protect us. We will no longer be silent”Inspired by a true story of a trial for infanticide, Saint-Omer seeks to explore “the great universal question” of our “relationship to motherhood”.The director until now specialized in documentaries, César 2017 for his short film Vers la tendresse, which made the very beautiful We this year, told AFP during the festival that he had used “a sordid-looking news item to go and question something much larger, which is the relationship that all women and all men have with motherhood“.Laurence Coly, the protagonist of the film played by Guslagie Malanda, is a Senegalese immigrant accused of having killed her 15-month-old baby by abandoning her on a beach from the north of France, as the tide rises. The film focuses on the trial, which Alice Diop witnessed. “I was obsessed with this story from the start […] I was really very upset, flabbergasted, crossed by a lot of quite intimate things about my relationship with motherhood“, she confided. The film will be released in France on November 23.
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