On Saturday, September 10, 2022, French senegalese filmmaker Aline Diop receives a double prize in Venice, Italy: the Grand Prix du Jury and the prize for the first film for her first fiction, “Saint-Omer”.
Upon receiving the awards, we see a woman moved and touched by a reward she may not have expected. In joy, she declares: “I no longer have the words”. And later at the end of a speech full of emotions, she affirms as a challenge to a society that martyrs women: “Silence will not protect us. We will not be silent,” she promised.
Born into a Senegalese family in France in the 1960s, Aline Diop was born in 1979 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, in the city of 3000, in France. She began by studying history. Very quickly, she was seduced by cinema and decided to focus on the visual arts. At the faculty of Évry, she opted for visual sociology. In 2005, she returned to Aulnay-sous-Bois to make a documentary about the documentary entitled “La Tour du monde”. This documentary that tells the life of Turkish, Sri Lankan and Malian families will establish Aline Diop’s reputation as a great director who will now be able to respond in the name of a filmmaker when asked for her job. The films succeed each other and are crowned with success: Vers la tendresse will be best short film at Césars 2017. We” will win the prize for best film in the Encounters section at the Berlinale and many other films.
Aline Diop is known as a director who paints a portrait of France. His films are inspired by the daily lives of people on the fringes, on the periphery, in the suburbs. She embellishes her films with her political intentions. She invites us to see men differently. Intimate stories, exciting, but also terrifying. She has a fair, cinematic intuition that makes her spot the favorable counter-hamps from the first. She sees herself as a “third eye”, a blind eye that reveals things the camera cannot see.
Aline Diop is at the top of her game. Its awards, placed under the seal of feminist struggle, in particular that of “women of color” questions us about our relationships to motherhood. Inspired by a fact and the trial that followed, his film, first fiction, by a trial on an infanticide. Saint-Omer, This is the name of the film that earned him the consecration. The director, who has only made documentaries, tries to answer questions related to motherhood. It is a sordid fact that portrays a woman. She is accused of an unimaginable crime: infanticide. Laurence Coly, a Senegalese immigrant, is accused of killing her 15-month-old baby. Even more horrible, she would have abandoned him on a beach when the tide was high. After the first part, he will be sued. This film is from reality. Aline attended the trial in person and here is what she says on it: “I was obsessed with this story from the beginning (…) I was really upset, flabbergasted, crossed by many rather intimate things about my relationship to motherhood”.
