Shades of Justice

Two women—one black, the other white—are under trial in the films Saint-Omer and Anatomy of a Fall

- Debarati Gupta

"MADAM Coly, do you know why you killed your daughter?" When asked this question, Lawrence Coly responds with a demure yet unsettling reply, "I do not know. I hope this trial will give me the answer." This chilling exchange sets the tone for Alice Diop's Saint-Omer (Silver Lion winner, Venice, 2022).

Saint-Omer is based on a real-life incident in the town of Saint-Omer wherein Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese immigrant woman, abandoned her 15-month-old child on Berck-sur-Mer beach, allowing the baby to drown, leading to a legal trial. In Saint-Omer, Lawrence Coly, a fictional representation of Fabienne Kabou, confronts a similar accusation of forsaking her breastfed infant on the seaside to die. Diop captures the chilling testimony in her film, witnessed in the actual Saint-Omer courtroom in 2016.

Coly’s equivocal and dissatisfying responses to the inquiries from the white female judge leave both the courtroom audience and film viewers grappling with the confounding question: Why would a mother engage in such an ‘unmotherly’ act?

This question is equally relevant in the South-Asian context. The 2019 report from the National Crime Report Bureau (NCRB) reveals that Maharashtra alone recorded 1,451 cases of abandoned newborns between 2011 and 2017. Rajasthan followed closely, trailed by Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. Indian mythology too features several instances: in the Mahabharata, Kunti, the mother of the Pandavas, had to abandon her first child, Karna, since he was born out of wedlock.

In Saint-Omer, Coly, mirroring Fabienne, attributes the commission of the heinous crime to the curse of the evil eye afflicting her family. The white judicial system (French in this case), is taken aback by Coly’s unabashed invocation of resorting to witchcraft as an explanation.