Free portrait
Alice Diop, long-term documentary filmmaker
Alice Diop © Aurélie Lamachère & 10th edition of Champs-Elysées Film Festival
Text by: Sabine Cessou Follow
5 mins
The French filmmaker, of Senegalese origin, signs with "We
» a sensitive film about ordinary people on the RER B line. A logical follow-up to his work, focused on reality and open to complexity.
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"
We does not mean my people, all those who are the same as me, but all those who can be the "I" of this us: to endorse it, to take it on their own, to test its strength
".
Alice Diop
, 42, is not into the binary ways of thinking of the time.
This quote is not from her, but from Marielle Macé, essayist and author of
Our cabins
(2019, Verdier Editions).
Loaded with references, awarded by the Berlinale and acclaimed by critics, this filmmaker brings a breath of fresh air and intelligence.
She introduces sensitivity, complexity and the ordinary into the minefield of the suburbs, without falling into “identities”, nor into a context of a presidential campaign where everything is reduced to
buzz
and controversy.
Daughter of Senegalese parents who arrived in France in 1966, having grown up in the Cité des 3000 in Aulnay-sous-Bois, she wanted to pay tribute to François Maspero, author of
Passengers at the Roissy-Express
(Seuil, 1990).
A hike around line B, which connects the northern suburbs to the southern suburbs, and which told for the first time in its sense of the suburbs "
not locked in a sociological or journalistic discourse
" but carried by an author's pleasure .
"
These non-places that I had lived in, this writer, in the magnificent beauty of his language, made them remarkable and gave us back a form of dignity
", she underlines on
France Culture
.
Reflections on a “creolized” Hexagon
Another click: the attacks of January and November 2015, in Paris.
This "
historic moment of changeover which questions what a country, a society is
", encourages him to embark on "
We
", a project which, beyond France, concerns all the companies which "
creole in Europe
”.
The front page of
Liberation
in January 2015, after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, proclaimed “
We are a people
”.
She calls out to him.
"
This
'we'
is for me elastic,
she specifies,
ignoring the way in which he can make hospitality to people he has not yet seen
".
The intimate is very present in "
We
", with an assumed subjective look, around a journey that is part of his personal topography.
The filmmaker follows her nurse sister, meeting people and their destinies along this RER line.
She questions her own father, just after a sequence on a Catholic mass celebrating Louis XVI, late king of France, at the Saint-Denis Basilica.
The stations in the film are not mentioned, and the testimonies are all the stronger in that they categorically refuse the cliché, the representation of an identity or any social category.
"
Revisiting a dominant imagination that sees permanent violence, rather looking at the suburbs in their banality, seeing the part of the universal in stories and lives
", such is the project.
She comes out of the gaze of the other, to focus her own on an experience that cannot be recovered by speeches.
A personality first and foremost true to itself
Alice Diop has a Master's degree in history at the Sorbonne and a DESS in visual sociology.
She explains that she has “
a 180 degree vision of French society
”, which she has made her strength.
She joined the documentary workshop of the Fémis and since 2005 has been making remarkable documentaries, linked together by the coherence of her gaze.
After
La Tour du monde
(2005), a journey through the stairwell of a public housing project in Aulnay-sous-Bois, into the worlds of families from Sri Lanka, Mali, Turkey and Congo, she continues to film the Parisian suburbs in her own way.
The tragedy of Zyad and Bouna, electrocuted at the age of 15, to escape police control, then the riots of 2005 in the suburbs, plunge it into a necessity and an emergency.
“
The story we told was so violent that I needed to take a camera and go to Clichy for a year to console myself
”.
She draws a counter-narrative from it,
Clichy for example
(2007), whose calm, composed and documented nature earned her rejection by the television channel that had commissioned it.
After a detour to Senegal, where she filmed
Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise
(2007), about three women in her family and her personal place in the courtyard of a household,
La Mort de Danton
(2011) returns to France on the formation during the Simon course of actor Steve Tientcheu.
"A film about silent violence and racist unthinking rooted in everyday experience"
.
La Permanence
(2016) fixes its gaze on a doctor from Bobigny examining migrants and the ills of exile, Grand Prix of the French competition at the Cinéma du réel festival.
His next documentary,
Vers la tendresse
(2016), where four young people from the neighborhoods confide in their love life, won him the César for best short film in 2017.
His next project, almost completed, is his first fiction feature,
Saint-Omer
, written in collaboration with his editor Amrita David and the author Marie NDiaye.
Alice Diop, who also participates in a media library project in the suburbs with the Center Pompidou, pulverizes the conflict - a French passion - by gaining height.
True to itself, it holds high the values of intellectual honesty and deep humanity which it is not forbidden to think that they are both
made in
France and
made in
Senegal.
►
To read: Senegalese filmmakers: a new wave?
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