‘Saint Omer’ Filmmaker Alice Diop Signs With CAA

Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” has scored U.S. distribution with Neon’s boutique label Super after making its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it won two major competition awards.Super will release the film in theaters, following its U.S.

Pat Saperstein Deputy Editor Super, the boutique distribution label from Neon, has acquired U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” after it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize in Venice along with the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award. “Saint Omer” was recently shortlisted for France’s submission to the Academy Awards and will premiere at the New York Film Festival and play the BFI London Festival. Neon plans a theatrical release. “Saint Omer” is Diop’s debut fiction feature, which she co-wrote with Amrita David and Marie NDiaye, and it stars Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville and Aurélia Petit. Toufik Ayadi and Christophe Barral of Srab Films produced alongside Arte France Cinéma and Pictanovo Hauts-de-France.

Neon’s boutique label Super has secured U.S. rights to Alice Diop’s acclaimed drama Saint Omer, following its world premiere earlier this month at the Venice Film Festival, where the film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, as well as the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future Award for Best Debut Feature.

EXCLUSIVE: Filmmaker Vincent Grashaw has signed with Gersh for representation.

Ben Croll Acclaimed documentarian Alice Diop marks her narrative debut with “Saint Omer,” a pulled-from-the-headlines legal drama that won the Grand Jury Prize and the award for best debut feature at the Venice Film Festival. High profile slots in Toronto, New York, and London are to come — making the French title one of the real breakouts of this fall season. The wrenching film follows Rama (Kayije Kagame), a young novelist covering the trial of an immigrant mother accused of infanticide. With major elements never in doubt – the accused, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), admits to the act, though she still pleads not guilty – the Venice winner turns around more intimate, philosophical, and unsettling questions.

On the inhospitable shores of Berck-sur-Mer, France, where the sounds of the tide mingle with a woman’s breathless running, is where Alice Diop’s narrative-feature debut “Saint Omer” begins.

Tilda Swinton is gracing the red carpet at the 2022 Venice Film Festival!

EXCLUSIVE: Diane Lane (Feud: Capote’s Women) has signed with CAA for representation.

Jessica Kiang In 2016, in the courtroom of Saint-Omer, a small, untouristed town off a D-road between Calais and Lille, the trial took place of a young Senegalese Frenchwoman accused of murdering her baby: an act so utterly antithetical to accepted ideas of motherhood and womanhood that it is inescapably considered the “worst of all possible crimes.” The woman, a PhD student with a reported genius IQ and a flair for flamboyantly intellectual French, confessed but claimed sorcery as the real culprit. It’s the kind of true story that presents an obvious opportunity for a sensitive social drama given to sober, sorrowfully objective observations about the perilous, tumbling vortex of class, gender, ethnic and cultural issues in which it plays out. “Saint Omer,” the deceptively austere, extraordinarily multifaceted fiction debut from documentarian Alice Diop, is not that film. 

Loneliness, postpartum-depression, motherhood, and isolation are at the core of Alice Diop’s feature film premiering at Venice, Saint Omer. Written by Diop and Marie N’Diaye, the movie stars Kayije Kagame and Guslagie Malanga. The film sends a message about the pressures of being a single parent and how women connect through trauma.

Some things we know to be true without a doubt include the sun rising every morning, water being wet, and Chris Rock not holding back on jokes.

EXCLUSIVE: Kids podcast company Wonkybot found agency. The company, which is behind the hit children’s audio series Tara Tremendous, has signed with CAA.

Ben Croll As Unifrance’s Daniela Elstner sees it, the wealth of talent in this year’s Venice slate imparts a good bill of health for the French industry writ large. “Today, festival directors look to France in a slightly different way,” Elstner says. “We can find eminences like Frederick Wiseman alongside [emerging talents] like Alice Diop. That’s the strength of a good selection: You need names, you need surprises, you need to mix it up.” Alongside Diop and Wiseman (whose “A Couple” is in French, if not a majority French production), this year’s Venice roster also includes “Other People’s Children” from Rebecca Zlotowski and “Our Ties” from Roschdy Zem — together forming a delegation perhaps more notable for the fact that none had competed in Venice before than for the almost incidental gender parity of the mix.

Ben Croll Exploring Paris’ working-class suburbs with a fresh set of eyes while reframing the immigrant experience under a more incisive lens, a dynamic generation is blazing new trails in French cinema. And if artists like “Saint Omer” filmmaker Alice Diop, “Athena” co-writer Ladj Ly, and “The Gravity” writer/director Cedric Ido share little in common but age – interestingly enough, all were born within one or two years of one another – the group’s shared spotlight in Venice and Toronto certainly reflects a rise in opportunity for diverse perspectives. “Today, we do see renewal,” says Unifrance managing director Daniela Elstner. “There’s an altogether new breath, a young generation looking to change, to dare, and to propose new kinds of films, [and with that] a willingness on the part of festival programmers to welcome these filmmakers into main competitions a little bit faster than before.”

EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed three-time Academy Award winner Ang Lee. Lee is the director of such acclaimed films as Life of Pi, Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon all of which won him an Oscar. Life of Pi was also nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning four, including Best Director for Lee and grossed more than $600 million worldwide, the groundbreaking Brokeback Mountain, which won three Academy Awards, including another Best Director win and four-time Academy Award-winning Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is the highest-grossing foreign language film U.S. history and won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

K.J. Yossman SRAB Films, producer of Ladj Ly’s 2019 Cannes effort “Les Misérables,” which was picked up by Amazon Studios, has been acquired by Asacha Media Group (AMG), according to reports.

France’s Asacha Media Group has acquired compatriot SRAB Films, the firm behind Ladj Ly’s Oscar-nominated Les Misérables.

Mark Jenkin’s latest Cornish horror Enys Men and Alice Diop’s feature debut Saint Omer are among the eight titles set to compete in the Official Competition of the 66th BFI London Film Festival, running from October 5 – 16.

Naman Ramachandran The BFI London Film Festival has revealed eight titles that will be in official competition. The films include Santiago Mitre’s political drama “Argentina, 1985” (Argentina); Clement Virgo’s brotherly love tale “Brother” (Canada); Marie Kreutzer’s irreverent period drama “Corsage” (Austria-Luxembourg-Germany-France); Fyzal Boulifa’s atmospheric domestic drama “The Damned Don’t Cry” (France-Belgium-Morocco); Mark Jenkin’s folk horror tale “Enys Men” (U.K.); Hlynur Palmason’s historical epic “Godland” (Denmark-Iceland-France-Sweden); Soudade Kaadan’s poignant family film “Nezouh” (U.K.-Syria-France); and Alice Diop’s courtroom drama “Saint Omer.”