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The “Venus” figure, as theorized by Saidiya Hartman in "Venus in Two Acts,"[3] is the embodiment of countless enslaved Black women whose lives were erased from the archive. More specifically, Venus appears in historical records as the name of an enslaved girl who died on the slave-trading ship called “Recovery”. However, Hartman uses this name to represent several instances of oppressed and dehumanized Black women in Atlantic slave trade records. Furthermore, she recognizes that even outside of the examples mentioned, “there are hundreds of thousands of other girls who share her circumstances and these circumstances have generated few stories.” [3] Exploring similar themes regarding Black women’s oppression, Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”[4] presents the importance of transforming centuries-long silence into language and action. “What is most important to [her] must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood… the speaking profits [her]”[4] and acts as a means of confronting fear and oppression. Alice Diop’s cinematic work aims to bring “Venus” stories of the untold to the eyes of moviegoers and break the veil of centuries-long quietness. Whether in her fiction film Saint Omer (2022)[1] or her documentary La Permanence (2016),[2] Diop ultimately compels action by breaking silence—using the language she knows best: cinema.

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La Permanence, one of Diop’s earlier works, centers the stories of refugees in France—people the broader public rarely hears from. The film documents their struggles to access welfare after immigration, portraying real accounts of violence, poverty, and suicidal ideation through a raw, unfiltered cinematic language. As viewers, we join the doctor and the other personnel in the consultation room. They attempt to treat each patient with as much compassion as they can but are ultimately powerless to change a political system that leaves refugees in extreme precarity. The consultation room is small, old, and worn down; within its walls, the stories are heard, but barely. When patients leave the clinic, their stories leave with them, unheard by the outside world. 

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Diop seeks to change that. By documenting these stories through film, she expands the walls of the clinic into the space of the cinema. These stories, once confined to two overworked healthcare professionals, are now witnessed by a full audience. Through the editing choices of the film, we get to experience and feel the pain of people whose stories are almost always ignored. Diop actively chooses not to cut away from the faces and bodies of distressed patients during a consultation and makes the effort to give them all the time they need to express themselves. While Venus may have been forgotten–“no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all”[3]–Diop urges audiences not to anonymize or forget these stories despite language or cultural barriers. Even though the patients struggle to communicate with the doctors, they are eventually understood, given enough time within the clinical and cinematic space. The only time the film cuts away from the patients, almost exclusively, is when we observe the French doctor and his personnel. They are a direct reflection of the audience. Unlike the patients, we also have the privilege to own a voice not bound by language. “For [us], it is [necessary] to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to [them].”[4]  Just as doctors try to heal their wounds, we must try to fix the systemic issues they face. While France recently adopted stringent immigration laws in January of this year, protests with more than 75,000 people in the streets prove that cinematic works like La Permanence are successful in turning oppressed silence into empowering action. Ultimately, in the film's final moments, the cinematography reveals a quiet and empty waiting area outside the consultation space, showing how these stories need to escape the clinic and be shown to the wider world. As the camera drifts away from the consultation room, the narratives must follow too.

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Saint Omer, Diop’s only fiction film, is directly inspired by the real-life Fabienne Kabou trial, in which a Black Senegalese woman was convicted for drowning her infant daughter. In the film, the defendant becomes Laurence Coly, a Black woman who stands out for the eloquence of her speech. The main character is Rama, a literature professor and the fictionalized representation of Alice Diop. Rama acts as a vessel to express Alice’s feelings during the trial. While the film explores the insecurities and anxieties of motherhood, it also grapples with how the ghost of one's past is carried and reshaped through speech that breaks the silence.

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