Saint Omer (2022) │ Black Women In Motion Film Series

The NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis presents a monthly film series exploring how Black women navigate displacement globally. Join us for a critical dialogue on place, belonging, and identity from across the African diaspora.

The fiction feature debut by documentary filmmaker Diop (We) is an emotionally rich, thought-provoking courtroom drama that adapts the shocking true story of a young Senegalese immigrant named Laurence (Malanga) in northern France on trial for murdering her baby daughter. Having admitted to the killing, she nevertheless refuses to admit motivation and denies that she’s to blame, saying she was affected by a curse. Attending the trial is Rama (Kagame), a journalist also of Senegalese descent who plans to write a book about Laurence, comparing her to Medea, and who is dealing with her own anxieties around becoming a mother. Multilayered and brilliantly acted, Saint Omer is both intensely psychological and observationally distant, a film about the impossibility of fully knowing another person and the estrangement of living in an adopted world.