Alice Diop on Connecting Black Poets Across Europe and America
Talk
© Aurélie Lamachère
On April 19, join Villa Albertine for an engaging conversation with filmmaker and former resident Alice Diop centered on connecting Black poets across the Atlantic.
In conversation with writer and curator Omar Berrada, Alice Diop, the award-winning director of Saint Omer, will discuss bringing together celebrated Black poets from Europe with American literary figures to collectively reflect on their identities during her Carte Blanche event at the Festival d’Automne in Paris last fall.
Diop explored the works of Black American poets during her Villa Albertine residency in New York in 2022. Inspiring her own personal and political journey, the poems of Robin Coste Lewis, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Claudia Rankine, and many more, became an essential part of her research and the development of her current film project.
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Panelists
Alice Diop, Filmmaker
After receiving a Master’s degree in History from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University and a Diplômes d’études supérieures spécialisées (D.E.S.S.) in Visual Sociology, Alice Diop attended the documentary film workshop at La Fémis. Since 2005, she has been making documentaries selected by international festivals (Cinéma du Réel, BFI London, Karlovy Vary, Viennale). In 2017, she won a César for Best Short Film and the Grand Prix at the Brive Film Festival for Vers la tendresse. That same year, she won first prize in the French competition at the Cinéma du Réel Festival with her documentary, La Permanence.
In 2011, she won the Prix des Bibliothèques with her first feature-length documentary, La Mort de Danton. Her most recent documentary, Nous, was selected for the Encounters section at the 2021 Berlinale, where she was honored with the Best Documentary and Encounters Awards. Her first feature-length fictional film, Saint Omer, selected in competition at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival, received the Silver Lion – Grand Jury Prize and the Lion of the Future “Luigi De Laurentiis” Award for Best Debut Film as well as a dozen other prizes at numerous international festivals. Saint Omer was France’s official entry for the 2022 Academy Awards®.
Omar Berrada, Writer, Curator, and Translator
Omar Berrada is a writer, curator, and translator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection, Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, including The Africans, on racial dynamics in North Africa (2016); La Septième Porte, a retrospective history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020); and Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (2024).