Film Forum

French screenwriter and director Alice Diop was born in 1979. After studying history and visual sociology at the Sorbonne, she began her career as a documentary filmmaker. Her short and medium length films selected and awarded prizes in several festivals include LES SÉNÉGALAISES ET LA SÉNÉGAULOISE (2007), LA MORT DE DANTON (2011), LA PERMANENCE (2016) and TOWARDS TENDERNESS (2016), which won the César for Best Short Film in 2017. Her feature length documentary WE (2021) won the Best Documentary Award as well as Best Film in the Encounters section of the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. SAINT OMER is Alice Diop’s fiction feature film debut.

Born in 1990, Guslagie Malanda made her feature film debut in the lead role in MY FRIEND VICTORIA by Jean-Paul Civeyrac in 2014, alongside Pascal Greggory. She holds a degree in Art History and has worked widely as an independent curator.

Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours and president of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. A specialist in the field of Africana Studies, she has conducted research and taught in several universities and prisons in the United States and France and was most recently the inaugural Villa Albertine Resident in Atlanta (2021-2022). From 2013 to 2017, Dr. Soumahoro served as a member of the National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery. She is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated in English by Dr. Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021) and prefaced by Saidiya Hartman. This book was distinguished by the FetKann! Maryse Condé literary prize in 2020. In 2022-2023, Maboula Soumahoro is International Visiting Professor at the African-American and Africana Studies Department of Columbia University as well as Visiting Faculty at Bennington College.

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