COURT ON CAMERA

By Ron Prince

Saint Omer, the first narrative feature from documentary-maker Alice Diop, is a profoundly-affecting, cinematicallyinventive and ultimately spellbinding courtroom procedural about Laurence, a French-Senegalese mother on-trial for infanticide.

Laurence stands accused of leaving her helpless child to drown on a beach near Calais, and readily admits her guilt. Rama, an author and university professor, witnesses the court proceedings, hoping it will help her with a novel she is planning. The film is based on the real-life 2016 French case, which Diop attended as an observer, of Fabienne Kabou, who was convicted of the same crime.

Shot by French cinematographer Claire Mathon AFC – whose visually-distinctive credits include Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019), Atlantique (2019), Spencer (2021) and Petite Maman (2021) – Saint Omer has been noted for the way in which the camera both moves and lingers, and how faces stand-out, to relate the story and heighten the intensity in what might otherwise have been a run-of-the-mill drama in a mundane, wood-panelled, provincial courtroom.

Examining the mystery of motives, as well as themes around cultural, familial and racial intolerance, the film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize at the 2022 Venice Film festival.

When did you first meet Alice Diop?

I first met Alice for Saint Omer almost two years before we actually shot the film. I was familiar with her work, in particular La Mort De Danton (2011, DP Blaise Harrison). Alice’s ideas, her vision and desire to recreate the trial she had attended, giving it an almost mythological dimension, made me want to make this film. I liked the importance given to the spoken word in the screenplay, which, for me, posed real questions about representation, and was I interested in her documentary-style approach towards the fiction.

What were your first discussions with Alice about the look for the

film?

Alice wanted to put faces in the light, portraits with a pictorial dimension. Very early on she showed me paintings and portraits that stayed in my mind throughout production on the film. One of the paintings, La Belle Ferronnière by Leonardo da Vinci, which I was lucky-enough to see at the Louvre Museum, became a framing reference.

I also looked at black models painted by Cézanne, and studied how artists treated dark skins against backgrounds in paintings like Aïcha by Felix Vallotton and Grape Wine by Andrew Wyeth. The way in which the face of the Cape Verdean heroine stands-out from the dark, whilst sublimating her too, in Pedro Costa’s film Vitalina Varela (2019), was a strong touchstone for Alice.

Alice also wanted a heightened reality, to discretely concentrate on the presence of the actresses, to give complexity to their characters, to connect the stories of Laurence and Rama and highlight the tragedy that comes when we reveal something of ourselves. We reviewed The Trial Of Joan Of Arc (1962, DP Léonce-Henri Burel) by Robert Bresson for its work on repetition and a certain purity. And, amongst all these references and conversations, we also considered the colour palette of the film – ochre, wood, brown, rust, bronze – especially with the costume designer Annie Melza Tiburce.

But, two months before the shoot, we went to the wood-panelled court in Saint Omer, where the case took place, and were convinced it was right this film. That day we spotted another room in the courthouse, much smaller, brighter, but with white walls that could be easily transformed into the actual court. Wooden panels seemed to us to be a crucial element for the film and this smaller space could help us bring the protagonists closer together, both physically and emotionally, especially when the glass box, that separates the accused, was removed.

Did you do much testing of different cameras and lenses?

I long-questioned the feeling of the light that the film needed, and spent time looking for the right tools, feeling that there was a balance to be found between the rhythm of the capture and a strong pictorial desire, while keeping the feeling of a documentary.

I did a short comparison test between Red Monstro with Primo lenses and Red Gemini with Leitz M 0.8 lenses, but this was more to confirm my intuition about the texture, definition and rendering of Laurence and Rama’s skins. These tests allowed me to really specify the colour palette and the contrast of the overall look.

What aspect ratio, cameras and lenses did you choose?

Tell us about the locations?

Meeting remotely during the Covid period, Alice and I discussed the decor, the space and lighting of the courtroom, and questioned whether we should shoot in the same place where the real-world trial had taken place, or recreate it elsewhere.

We considered the historic courtrooms on the Île de la Cité, in Paris – which have now moved to modern premises – for their splendour and for what they tell about the institution of the French Republic. You can see them in Raymond Depardon’s film The 10th District Court: Moments Of Trials (2004).

We went 1.85:1, for the simplicity of the relationship between a character framed in medium close-up and the background. I shot with a Red Gemini, full frame at 5K, and Leitz M 0.8 lenses, using the 50mm a lot, with a Schneider HD Classic Soft 1/16 filter. The camera package came from Panavision.

Did you create any LUTs (Look-UpTables) for the film?

I worked on LUTs with colourist Yov Moor, but for planning reasons I was not able to do the final colour with him. I remember the difficulty of not losing details in extreme highlights, while keeping a bright image. And

I did not want the assertion of our colour palette to deplete other colours. For example, I found that the greens often suffered in our attempts to accentuate the wooden and brown values in the image.

What was your approach to moving the camera for storytelling purposes?

It was a single camera