SAINT OMER Trailer, TIFF 2023

In this extraordinary narrative debut by acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop, a young novelist is forced to confront her personal traumas as she observes the trial of a woman accused of infanticide. For the past decade, awardwinning documentarian Alice Diop has turned her camera on the injustices and intimate stories of immigrant communities on the peripheries of Paris in a meaningful act of recentring. With Saint Omer, her astonishing narrative feature debut, she brings her typical sensitivity and rigour to a story liberally adapted from a 2013 fait divers, in which a woman allegedly placed her 15monthold daughter on a beach in northern France, abandoning her to the high tide. This progressively claustrophobic courtroom drama is told through the stoic point of view of Rama (played with restrained intensity by a superb Kayije Kagame), a young novelist working on a contemporary retelling of the ancient Medea myth. Pregnant herself and increasingly uneasy, Ramas own family history, doubts, and