The Saint Omer director has gathered work by artists, writers, composers and poets for Geste de Consolation, set in the 60m-long central hall of the Palais d’Iena in ParisAlice Diop has just returned to France from California when we speak. It’s a Zoom meeting with a bad connection, and Diop leans close to the camera, always in frame, barely moving. It’s like watching the characters in her documentaries and films, where her camera lingers on its subject with a slow, cool intensity.Diop had been attending a two-week celebration of her work organised by the French department at University of California, Berkeley, in which academics pored over her documentaries (Nous (We), Vers La Tendresse (Towards Tenderness)) and her first feature film, Saint Omer, which received the Silver Lion in Venice in 2022. The courtroom drama was inspired by a real trial that Diop attended, of a Senegalese woman who had allowed her baby to drown in the sea. Over two hours, it explored the complexities of race, culture and motherhood in contemporary France. The film was the first by a black female director to be entered by France as its official entry in the 2023 Academy Awards. Continue reading...