Manager: Alice Diope
artists: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanda, Valérie Dréville
Premiere: 3/3/23
Year: 2022
Punctuation: ★★★★★
Few exits in fiction like this Alice Diop, a Senegalese-French documentarianeven if he changes his track record, choosing the history of a woman’s trial for a point of view and a distance (he doesn’t decide as if he thinks she’ll be too arrogant for him) is perhaps more common in documentary than fiction.
Inspired by a true event, ‘Aziz Omer’ tells the story of a novelist (Kayige Kagame) who attends the trial of a mother (Guslagie Malanda) accused of abandoning her baby on the seashore.. Much of the film chronicles this case, a grim history told in long plots that keep the testimony of the accused and other parties on a devastating pulse. It’s not an easy movie, because it’s not easy to face a movie that deals with incomprehensible horror (baby murder) from dry image and revealing but not deciphering word.
‘Holy Omar’ work against the current. At a time when themes and theses precede stories and characters, Diop reverses the order and produces a film that invites the audience to listen (and observe) human contradictions; His conclusions on what he can do, such as uprooting, a sense of not belonging, the search for identity, the bond between mother and daughter, and the void in front of the inexplicable.