​Filmmaker Alice Diop’s extraordinary narrative feature debut, Saint Omer, follows Rama, a writer and soon-to-be mother who travels to the northern French town of Saint-Omer to attend the trial of Laurence Coly, a graduate student and French-Senegalese immigrant accused of murdering her infant daughter. As Rama struggles with anxiety surrounding her pregnancy and her work, she begins to recognize unsettling parallels between herself and Coly, connections that quietly unravel her sense of certainty about motherhood, identity, and inheritance.

​What Diop is able to do here is nothing short of miraculous, she crafts a courtroom drama that feels intimate in scope, yet emotionally sprawling, calling into question our own relationship to perceived objectivity and propensity to judge and create our own narratives. Saint Omer becomes less a question of guilt or innocence than an inquiry into belief: what society expects of mothers, whose stories are allowed complexity, and how race, migration, and history shape the ways women are seen and heard. The film deftly, with equal care and precision examines misogynoir, the post-colonial psyche, and the profound isolation produced by displacement and cultural expectation.

​I first encountered Saint Omer three years ago, and with each revisit it has only grown more haunting, more mysterious, and more overwhelming. Diop weaves a work that is at once slippery, disquieting, and rigorous, while deeply compassionate, an intricate, unwieldy courtroom film unlike anything I’ve experienced.

​About Exposure

​​​​This screening is presented by Exposure, a traveling cinema and podcast created by Brandon Shillingford. Through engaging programming and conversation, Exposure is dedicated to celebrating overlooked films, cinematic history, and building community around the emotional, political, and cultural dimensions of cinema with creativity, thoughtfulness, and care.

Follow along at @exposure.cinema on Instagram and at exposurecinema.org for more information.