Małni — towards the ocean, towards the shore: An Authentic Perspective of an Indigenous Nation from Sky Hopinka

By Doak Dean

Małni — towards the ocean, towards the shore: An Authentic Perspective of an Indigenous Nation from Sky Hopinka

By Doak Dean

Małni — towards the ocean, towards the shore: An Authentic Perspective of an Indigenous Nation from Sky Hopinka

By Doak Dean

Still from Saint Omer (2022).

Conversation with Alice Diop

Led by TEGA AJISE

Alice Diop is an acclaimed French Senegalese filmmaker and visionary storyteller who has a rich portfolio of documentary and fiction films. Known for award-winning films like La Permanence (2016), Nous (2021), and Saint Omer (2022), she explores themes of identity, migration, and justice with poetic restraint and emotional depth. Raised in the suburbs of Paris, Diop draws from her personal experiences to tell stories often overlooked in mainstream French cinema. Her background in anthropology and sociology also informs her crucial observations of postcolonial France and marginalized communities. Having a unique visual style that merges realism with symbolic resonance, she is reshaping the political potential of cinema. Currently Diop is a visiting professor at Harvard University in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.

The following is an excerpt from a presentation and discussion during Alice Diop’s class visit on March 13, 2025.

TEGA AJISE: What inspired the film [Saint Omer]?

ALICE DIOP: The inspiration came from a real trial I attended—a case that had been making headlines about a young Senegalese woman who left her child at high tide on a beach. For a long time, I couldn't understand why I was so obsessed with a story that was so difficult. Perhaps it was because of the several parallels to my life—she was about my age and a mother of a mixed-race child.

I want to make it clear that I've never had the desire to kill my son, (she laughs) whom I love very much. I might be a little neurotic, but not to that extent.

Attending the trial made me confront the darker side of motherhood—the inherent violence of the experience. The first fundamental question for me was about motherhood, but the second was about representation: how to depict Black women with all the breadth and depth of their emotions and psyche. This was something I had rarely seen in film.

AILY NASH: How did you get into documentary filmmaking?

ALICE DIOP: I spent two years researching colonial history as part of my master’s degree, a subject I was deeply passionate about. At that stage, I had the option to pursue a doctorate, but during my research, I realized how colonial violence had shaped my own lived experience as a Black woman in France. Twenty years ago, colonial history was largely silenced in France, unlike African American studies in the U.S. Studying it within academia felt almost like an act of dissent.

Technically, my research was under the prestigious Sorbonne, but in reality, it took place in a basement on the outskirts of Paris, far removed from the center of intellectual power. That stark contrast reflected how marginalized the subject was.

Ultimately, the profound impact of my research helped me understand the violence inflicted on my family and community, and it made me want to share it with as many people as possible. Cinema, as a democratic medium, allowed me to take knowledge from an obscure academic corner and bring it to the wider world.

Still from Saint Omer (2022).

KAI LEWIS: In Saint Omer, you could really feel how everyone exhibited restraint, letting each scene and character moment shine in its own light. With long takes, beautiful performances, and an amazing script, how did it feel to witness these moments as a director—seeing real-life moments become cinematic poetry?

ALICE DIOP: When I was watching the trial, I was taking notes throughout, immediately drawn to the language this woman was using and the dynamic between the judge and the defendant. I was not able to take notes fast enough, but I just knew I had to make verbatim speech the primary material of this film because what I hoped was for the viewers to hear what was happening beneath these words. In that sense, it's a very literary film and I think that I would not have made the film if there hadn't been something so strong in the language of this woman.

I didn't have direct access to the trial transcript, but a journalist from a public radio station had been live-tweeting it. Between my notes and those public records, I was able to reconstruct a somewhat verbatim transcript.

Once I had this material, I worked not with a screenwriter but with my editor, and together we pieced together monologues and dialogues. As we did, we realized the incredible power of this woman’s speech; it was almost literary. The plot of the film, then, is not about whether she killed her child but about the power of her language. Every staging choice was made such that this language could be heard.

The long takes were necessary because this language had to be heard. And this is also the speech of a Black woman. In France, there’s a psychoanalytic and political power in showing that.

Journalists kept expressing shock at how eloquently she spoke, which I found extremely racist. It was as if they couldn’t fathom a Black woman speaking with such literary fluency. In the U.S., people don’t care as much about perfect English because everyone comes from somewhere else, but in France, language mastery determines perception.

Even the fact that the woman in the trial claimed to be a doctoral student (even though we later discover that she lied about it) was significant. It showed her desire to escape stereotypes. Her thesis on Wittgenstein, a philosopher of language, was revealing.

I’m obsessed with language, which is why I feel neurotic when speaking English. In France, absolute mastery of French is one of the only ways a Black woman can counter prejudice. That’s why language is the subject of the film: this woman constructed a character for herself through the power of her speech. One of France’s greatest novelists was also obsessed with the way she spoke. In a sense, this woman became trapped in her own linguistic performance: protected by it but also used it to distance herself from the violence of her actions.

Still from Saint Omer (2022).

TEGA AJISE: It would be easier to give context with an excerpt from Saidiya Hartman’s essay, “Venus in Two Acts”:[3]

While the daily record of such abuses, no doubt, constitutes a history of slavery, the more difficult task is to exhume the lives buried under this prose, or rather to accept that Phibba and Dido exist only within the confines of these words, and that this is the manner in which they enter history. The dream is to liberate them from the obscene descriptions that first introduced them to us.

I remember that during the trial, the prosecutor mentioned that Kabou had told no one about her daughter, and since the child died after just 15 months, it was as if she had never existed at all. The trial was centered on Kabou’s story, how it was being told. Did you attempt to explore broader cases of infanticide—stories of infants or people whose lives are never documented—or do you feel those stories are told through the experiences of mothers?

ALICE DIOP: When I attended the trial, I felt that this little girl, who had no legal existence, was born in that courtroom. It was the first time she was being named. That moved me deeply. In a way, the justice system was doing justice to her—through the ritual of the trial, she was given an existence.

I was serious about not showing the child in the film. There was a devastating moment in the trial when the forensic examiner presented images of the little girl, both alive and dead. I completely broke down. I couldn’t listen anymore.

The violence of that moment petrified me. In writing the script, I had to work through that. Though the girl is never shown, she is present throughout the film. The courthouse becomes a mausoleum for her. The film is not just about this woman but about motherhood itself. Her absence makes her existence more profound.

There’s one moment in the trial that always makes me emotional. The judge asks if the child was ever sick, and the mother says no. But then the judge corrects her: "Yes, she was. She had chickenpox." That scene breaks me every time. The little girl was there at that moment. She wasn’t raised, invested in, or loved—but that doesn’t stop me from trying to understand this mother.

Still from Saint Omer (2022).

TEGA AJISE: I found it interesting too because I also kind of noticed that there was no mention or existence of the girl outside of the courtroom, but I did notice there was a bit of foreshadowing at the very beginning right when you open, they had the scene of the mother when she's carrying her child and walking on the beach. Then it cuts to Rama in bed and her spouse was saying that she kept yelling “mom, mom, mom” in her sleep.

KAI LEWIS: One scene that really stood out to me is when Rama watches Pasolini’s Medea [5]. It's not merely a reference saying ‘this is Medea,’ we watch the film for quite a long time to absorb the entire scene. I was just wondering about that longevity and if you actually did watch Medea whilst the case was happening as a comparative study of how infanticide has been presented in film. Or was that a more symbolic, creative liberty that you took?

ALICE DIOP: I think it's both. Something very crazy happened when I was at the trial – when the mother gave testimony about killing her child, she did not say, “Yes, I put my daughter in the water, and then she drowned.” Instead, she gave this speech that was extremely literary, ‘The moon is shining as I walk, illuminating my steps like a projector…’ What the character says in the film is what the mother actually said, so there was something in the lyrical quality of her speech that kind of erased the action. When I heard her give this testimony, there was something weird, almost as though I had heard it before. A few weeks later, when I started to work on the film, I watched Pasolini’s Medea. When I saw the scene where she kills the child, I understood that Fabienne Kabou had seen it. She was probably recounting the scene that she saw in Medea. I haven't spoken with her about it, but for me it's so clear that culturally she would've seen this film. By using Medea in her testimony, in a sense she's helping us understand her action. After all, what mythology does is that it allows us to understand things about the human experience that direct violence does not. So I made this film because once she was arrested and was asked to explain her action, she did not say: “I drowned my daughter,” she said: “I placed her body on the beach so that the sea could take her.”

Personally, there’s something very gentle in this phrase and in its mythological aspect. It's Moses; it's all these references. There's something very constructed in this idea of placing a child on the beach from a sort of psychoanalytic perspective. It’s very Lacanian, but in French, the word for mother and the word for sea sound the same (mère/mer). So the story I told myself is that she gave her child another mother that's more powerful, who is capable of protecting her. Almost as if she made an offering. That was the suggestion. So even though Medea is this powerful and violent woman who out of vengeance for Jason kills her children, she's also killing them to protect them from having to live as the children of a foreign woman in a hostile place. So for me, the mythology was quite important in that way.

REFERENCES

[1] Diop, Alice, dir. Saint Omer. (2022)

[2] Diop, Alice, dir. On Call - La Permanence (2016).

[3] Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” In Small Axe, No. 26, 1-14. Duke University Press, June 2008.

[4] Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 40-44. New York: Crossing Press, 1977.

[5] Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1969. Medea. United States: New Line Cinema.