07.06.24, 19:30, Nous (2020), Alice Diop

Soup and bread will be served before the film starts

The RER B is an urban train that traverses Paris and its environs from north to south. Multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker Alice Diop takes us through these suburban spaces and confronts us with some of the faces and stories of which they are composed. Documenting people as fragments, the ephemeral yet everyday in-between places they share, Alice Diop proposes another way to look at the production of dominant images, and reflect on the foundation of creolized and hybridized contemporary Western societies. In her documentary Nous, she takes up the approach taken 30 years ago by French writer François Maspero in his book Les Passagers du Roissy Express, in which he recounted subjective experiences of RER B users, a line of transport crossing the city of Paris from north to south. With the point of view of her own history, she takes this same route and gathers, in the present, the memory and traces of people who have never been told. This journey is not meant to be brought to a close, but rather to continue telling a story, adding layers to it, as an invitation to pass on the baton.

Alice Diop

Alice Diop was born in 1979 and raised in the Cité des 3000, a neighbourhood in the Parisian suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois. In her work, she sets out to make visible those people she is “conditioned to reject”, to anchor their place in film history. She studied history at the University of Evry and documentary film at La Femis in Paris. She made her debut in 2005 with La Tour du monde, a docuseries in which she returns to the suburb where she grew up. This was followed in 2011 by La Mort de Danton, a movie about a 25-year-old black man from the Paris suburbs who tries to escape violence by taking an acting course. It was later followed by La Permanence (2016), and Nous (2021), among others. Saint Omer, Diop’s first feature-length film, immediately won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Since 2022, Diop has been co-curating the programme for “La Cinémathèque idéale des banlieues du monde” at the Centre Pompidou. (Bio derived from Sabzian)