Alice Diop: Cinema From the Margins

Alice Diop discusses her work as a director and screenwriter, in conversation with Mame-Fatou Niang, beginning with a discussion about how the “ordinary” is explored through her approach to filmmaking, and expanding to encompass broader questions about her creative process and the exceptional body of work it has produced.  Time will be reserved for a Q&A with the audience.

Alice Diop is a Senegalese-French director and screenwriter who was raised in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a banlieue of Paris. After studying history and visual sociology at the Sorbonne, she began her career as a documentary filmmaker. Her short and medium length films were selected and awarded prizes in several festivals, include Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise (2007), La Mort de Danton (2011), La Permanence (2016) and Towards Tenderness (2016), which won the César for Best Short Film in 2017. Her feature length documentary We (2021) won the Best Documentary Award as well as Best Film in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. She explained her documentary approach by saying, “ For 15 years, I’ve been making films from the margins, with a political intention of filming those margins – the banlieue, people who have been silenced, because those are the people I come from. That’s my territory, my history.”  

Alice Diop made her fiction film debut in 2023 with Saint-Omer, based on the true story of a Senegalese woman who stood trial for infanticide in France.  Saint-Omer won her international acclaim as well as two awards at the Venice International Film Festival, and it was France’s entry for the best international feature at the Academy Awards in 2023, making Diop the first black woman ever to represent France in the Oscar race. 

Mame-Fatou Niang is Associate Professor of French Studies, the Founder | Director of the Center for Black European Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and an Artist-in-Residence at Ateliers Médicis. Her books include Identités Françaises (2019) and Universalisme, co-written with Julien Suaudeau (2022).

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