Alice Diop’s journey with Saint Omer started in 2015 when she opened a newspaper. Flicking through the pages of Le Monde, “the police were looking for this woman. She was an immigrant from Senegal. They released a still of her wheeling her mixed-race baby in a pushchair at the train station.” The woman, Fabienne Kabou, had been accused of an unspeakable act, researching the timing of the tide and then leaving her 15-month-old daughter on the beach to drown. Baby Adélaïde’s body was recovered by fishermen two days later.
Diop became obsessed with the case, but the articles she read on Kabou had racist undertones, with comments on how surprisingly articulate Kabou was. For Diop, there was a “fundamental contradiction in how I saw her and how the press was writing about her.” The director was also well versed in the murder of Grégory Villemin, a four-year-old who was found in the River Vologne with his hand and feet bound in 1984. “The mother of the child was accused of being the murderer, and it was totally wrong,” says Diop, and she suspected that a similar injustice might now be taking place.