Over the last decade, Alice Diop has established herself as one of the leading voices in French cinema. In her most recent documentary, We Nous , , Alice wanders along the commuter rail line that extends from the north of Paris to the south, encountering Ismael, a Malian immigrant living in a truck; a visiting nurse and her elderly patients; fast-talking teenagers; participants in a traditional fox hunt; acclaimed French writer Pierre Bergounioux; and monarchists celebrating the memory of Louis XVI.
Combining these encounters with her own experience as a French woman whose parents were immigrants from Senegal, Diop creates a deceptively serene, complex portrait of a society in transition, mining the present for an uneasy history and signs of the future.
She recently directed her first fiction feature, Saint Omer , which won the Grand Jury Prize and the prize for best debut feature at the Venice Film Festival. Like many who get to know her, I remain in awe of the intensity of her commitment to her art. I am also drawn to her warmth, a quality that carries over into her films, imbuing their rigorous form with a singular sensibility that is not only the vision of the filmmaker but the sense of her presence, whether or not she appears on screen.
As I learned in this conversation held on a park bench in Brooklyn last July, presence is also a matter of how you look at the people you film. In talking to Alice about the gaze, I understood why her films feel so unexpectedly sensual, and why I was so eager to interview her for Extra Extra. Photo: Cyrille Choupas.
Courtesy of Totem Films, Paris. Nicholas Elliott : You were immediately receptive when I suggested we have a conversation about sensuality in the urban environment. How come? Alice Diop : Sensuality is at the heart of my practice of filmmaking. For many reasons. With my academic background, I have a very cerebral, intellectual approach to research and working on film. Yet film is a tool that allows me to use the senses and perception to express this cerebral side, this obsession with realising a project in the most accurate way possible.
