Saint Omer

A pregnant novelist travels to a courtroom in Saint Omer to observe the trial of a young Senegalese woman charged with leaving her baby daughter on a beach to the incoming tide. As the accused gives her strange, halting testimony, the writer finds herself unsettled by feelings she cannot fully own.

The film turns the trial into an encounter with the maternal uncanny, where another woman's dread reflects the observer's own unspoken fear back at her. It gives a therapist a grave meditation on ambivalence, inheritance, and the darkness inside motherhood. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Venice Film Festival.