Alice Diop, 2022, 122 min.
Screening followed by a discussion with Aubrey Gabel and Zoë L. Henry

Inspired by a real contemporary French trial, Saint Omer follows a novelist observing the prosecution of a young Senegalese woman accused of killing her infant daughter. As testimony unfolds, the courtroom becomes a space in which questions of race, migration, motherhood, class, and postcolonial identity are examined. Like the other historical trials in the History on Trial film series, the proceedings reveal far more than the fate of a single defendant. They expose the social and cultural tensions of contemporary France while demonstrating how trials create records through which future generations may seek to understand the present.

Watch the trailer here.

Speakers

Aubrey Gabel is an Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone literature, cinema, and visual culture. Her research explores formal experimentation and the political possibilities of storytelling across media, with particular interests in avant-garde literature, comics, and graphic albums. She is the author of The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics and is currently researching comics and global Francophone cinema.

Zoë L. Henry is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with research and teaching interests in African American literature, diaspora studies, global modernism, gender and sexuality, feminist theory, and dance and performance. Her current book projects are The Public Interior: Women, Race, and the Spaces of Modernity, and another tentatively entitled Making Generations: Black Feminist Fiction, Urban Sound, and the Challenge of Memory.

This film is part of the Maison Française film series History on Trial. The series is curated by Shanny Peer, with contributions by Emmanuel Kattan and Jane Gaines.