In Celine Song’s extraordinary debut film, Nora ( Greta Lee), a playwright living in New York, married happily enough to fellow writer Arthur (John Magaro), finds her world rattled when a man from her past, Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung, suddenly re-enters her orbit. Malanda’s radiantly somber face, held by the camera with a kind of inquisitive tenderness as she tells her story on the stand, is the heart of the picture. This is a perceptive and delicately unnerving work, a reflection on the way humans can instinctively reach out to one another even across seemingly uncrossable chasms. But as she listens to Laurence’s story, she begins to see the web of experience and feeling that connects her with her subject. Rama’s plan is to gather material for an updated retelling of Medea. Rama (Kayije Kagame), a professor and novelist, travels from Paris to the town of Saint-Omer to attend the trial of a woman named Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), accused of an unthinkable crime that she doesn’t deny.

From that story, Diop has extracted a picture that’s both poetic and compassionately direct. French documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s first fiction feature is based on a real-life French court case involving a Senegalese immigrant who left her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to die.

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