Film reviews: Saint Omer takes an enigmatic look at courtroom drama, while Descendant plunges into a modern-day search for a slave ship
Both films, part of Black History Month screenings at VIFF Centre, untangle true events
Vancouver International Film Festival presents Saint Omer February 3 to 5, 7 to 10, and 12 and 16 at VIFF Centre and Descendant February 3 to 7, and 9, as part of its Black History Month program
Saint Omer
FOR LONG SWATHS of Saint Omer, a still camera focuses on the even testimony of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda in a remarkable performance), who’s as inscrutable as a Sphinx. She stands wearing brown sweaters that blend into a courtroom’s wood-panelled walls—a visual reminder of her lack of visibility in French society.
Director Alice Diop makes bold formal choices, basing her Silver Lion-winning film on a true 2015 trial that she attended in Saint Omer, France: that of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese woman charged with murder, for leaving her 15-month-old daughter to drown overnight in the tide on a beach. Like Laurence here, the highly educated Kabou did not dispute events, but blamed traditional witchcraft.
That would be more than enough to create an arresting courtroom procedural, but Diop steers the film into more mysterious, complex territory—one that takes a hard and unresolved look at race, immigration, and ideals of the new France.
She does that by telling the story through the eyes of French-born Senegalese writer Rama (the quietly arresting Kayije Kagame), who heads to the courtroom to fashion a bestseller out of the courtroom drama. Instead, as she sits watching the trial, she’s forced to face her own similarities to Laurence: they’re both driven intellectuals, both in relationships with white men, and both live in conflict with distant mothers. What we see are two cultivated women striving for intellectual status—one white witness praises Laurence’s “politesse”. But Laurence’s story reveals the anguished isolation of a woman who can’t quite be accepted, or seen, in France; even when she returns to Senegal, she can’t fit in anymore, and gets mocked for her Parisian ways.
Until the end, Laurence recounts her story—money problems, a fraught relationship with a much-older married white man, and increasing loneliness and alienation—with a lack of emotion. Even her references to sorcery and curses are presented matter-of-factly. Diop breaks up that evidence with Rama’s own dreamlike flashbacks to interactions with her distant mother as a girl, plus judicious use of a score whose female vocalizations sound like haunting encantations.
Diop ultimately asks the viewer to make whatever sense they can of the testimony—even having the defence attorney deliver her final argument looking straight into the lens at us. Don’t expect to come to easy judgment in this complicated and mystifying trip to the courtroom.
Descendant
Margaret Brown’s ruminative, poetic, and deeply unsettling new documentary is much more than a straightforward story of the discovery of a shipwreck—even with a key role by former Vancouver Maritime Museum executive director and famed underwater explorer Jim Delgado.
The film does follow the discovery of the Clotilda—believed to be the last slave ship in American history, illegally arriving in 1860, and burned and sunk to the bottom of the Mobile River in Alabama to destroy the evidence. But the reaction of the local Black community, all descendants of that last shipment of slaves, to that news says it all. In a big, showy press conference celebrating the news, with white politicians and oceanic explorers (including Delgado), the residents of Africatown look pained and lost in thought. Just watch their faces when one official describes a painted reproduction of human cargo in the holds of the ship as “wonderful”.
That community has long known the ship lay at the bottom of the river, devotedly passing the story down through oral history for generations. In many ways, they need no hard evidence. As one resident says, “I don’t need proof; I’ve lived with it my whole life.” Another young man walks through the Africatown graveyard, speaking about the importance of talking to his ancestors.
But what Brown really digs into here are the actions of another group of “descendants”: those of Alabama landowner Timothy Meaher, who smuggled the slave ship to the Mobile River from what is now Benin two centuries ago. Through the Meaher ancestors’ actions, the slaves freed five years after their arrival were sold undesirable land outside Mobile, where the Meaher descendants and others proceeded to surround the community with overpasses and toxic factories that would leave a legacy of illness and cancer that lasts today.
It’s scathing—the sort of story that gets more shocking as it goes along. Brown interweaves witness accounts with meditative shots of the landscape —from its quiet swamps to its factory-pocked riverways, the camera finding telling details, like the red “MEAHER” posts that seem to cordon off every pocket of land around Africatown, including a former plantation. There are also incredible archival shots of former slave and community founder Cudjo Kazoola Lewis, whose firsthand account of the ship and its prisoners, as recorded by pioneering Black journalist Zora Neale Hurston, is quoted throughout.
It’s one of the best documentaries you’ll see this year, one that asks profound questions not just about the racial divides that continue in the Deep South, but about history and truth, and the ownership of stories.
Related Articles
