Alice Diop, the gaze of the suburbs

This article is published in number 48 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 29, 2022

To the recurring question «are you living a fairy tale?», she replies dryly: «I didn’t transform myself from a whore into a princess overnight». Alice Diop, 43, a Parisian director, deplores reductive and somewhat paternalistic speeches. And she doesn’t hide it, at the cost of appearing rough. Yet it is the same one that wavered with emotion when, during last Venice Film FestivalJulianne Moore handed her the Silver Lion for Saint Omer, film about an infanticide mother. And that, finding no words from her, with a broken voice, she borrowed those of the American feminist Audre Lorde: “Black women, our silence will not protect us”.

Who was he addressing? “To you, to me, to my sisters, to our enemies, to those who wait for us and to those who don’t want us”, he replies today without batting an eye, in her house in Noisy-le-Sec, in the Parisian banlieue of Seine -Saint-Denis.

He receives me in a pretty outbuilding at the end of his garden. The office is overflowing with essays and books on the humanities; on the wall hangs a photograph of a march for Adama Traoré (a young black man of 24 killed in 2016 by the French gendarmerie in the banlieue of Paris; like George Floyd, crushed and suffocated under the weight of an agent, ed). Alice Diop is complex and preconceived speeches are the antithesis of her lucid and structured thinking. Now that Saint Omer has been selected to represent France at the Oscars, the director is honored but her enthusiasm is moderate, as if anchored to the ground by deeper convictions. “A film directed by a black French woman, with two black French actresses, represents France,” she says. “No need to add anything else.”

He doesn’t want to be a symbol, but pave the way for other artists, as he did Sarah Maldoror, the pioneer of pan-African cinema, unfortunately almost unknown to the general public. Before moving on to fiction, Alice Diop shot magnificent documentaries, explored the territories of the suburbs, cast a rare humanity gaze on individuals forgotten by society and shed a light on social violence. Her feature films were born “either from revolt and anger, or from the need to shake certainties and clichés”.

Little Alice grew up in Aulnay-sous-Bois, always in the banlieue of Seine-Saint-Denis. His mother was a domestic worker and his father a factory worker, both from Senegal. After graduating she studied history, driven by her desire, «perhaps unconscious», to understand the story of her family. The anthropologist’s documentaries Eliane de Latour, discovered along the way, revealed all the possibilities of the camera. «Films don’t change the world», she explains, «but they do change the viewers who, together, can change the situation».
He conducts research, investigates reception centers for migrant workers, before deciding to film his father, retired and “confined between two worlds”. He watches him go from a plate of chicken yassa to a camembert, immortalizes him, a year before his death, while he watches on television images of a fantasized Africa. This gradually becomes his trademark: to penetrate the complicated psyche of the “exiles of the soul” and evoke the intimate to tell the universal.

His films are full of unforgettable, poignant and impossible to ignore looks. To realize On Call (2016), spent a year in a counseling center for migrants at Bobigny hospital. Through a succession of long fixed shots, she places the viewer in front of faces pierced by the pain of exile. Remaining neutral in the face of so much suffering is impossible. Thus, in the final minutes of the film, the director herself enters the frame to console a weeping mother.
In the medium-length film Vers la tendresse, winner of a César in 2017, interviews four kids living in the Parisian banlieue about their relationship with intimacy and feelings. “I’m attracted to whores and troubled girls,” says one. “I’ve never seen my father kiss my mother,” confides another. Take pictures of men killing time in a race hall or hanging out in the red light district of Amsterdam. The strength of the subject arises from this discrepancy between the images and the words filled with the vulnerability of the interviewees. In the incessant exploration of the realities on her margins, the director also questions our way of being society. Throughout her career, Alice Diop has been consistently labeled a «director of the suburbs», recognized as a specialist in a separate sub-genre, a privileged observer of a ghost territory. “You can be a director just by filming people who live in a city,” she underlines.You know that language is the best tool for passing from one world to another. When she speaks, she chooses her words carefully and precisely.

In 2013 she had been disturbed by the way the media had covered the infanticide of Berck-sur-Mer in the Haute-France region. “Why did Fabienne Kabou, the woman of Senegalese origin accused of the murder of her 15-month-old daughter, speak so well?” was the question that the journalists repeated to themselves, as if they were missing something. Saint Omer questions our view of that enigmatic mother, seemingly without regrets and using words as a shield. Her sensitive evocation of the complex relationship with motherhood has a rare power. To the point that one day, during an interview, a tearful journalist confided her emotion to her. “She couldn’t have given me a nicer gift,” Alice recalls.

Today, neither the shower of awards nor the Hollywood spotlight seem to scare the director. “I set my own pace,” she says. “I take enough space to understand what is happening to me.” At the end of our meeting she thanks me for having gone to Noisy-le-Sec, in the Parisian banlieue. As if she still struggles to recognize that the boundaries of cinema have finally become more blurred, partly thanks to her.

Photo Laura Stevens, Manon Del Colle service.

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