- Feb 5, 2002
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The line between abortion and infanticide is growing increasingly blurred
Saint Omer is a French film that picked up distinctions at the Venice International Film Festival and has hit wider distribution in the United States. It’s based on the story of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese immigrant to France who committed infanticide in 2013 by leaving her 15-month daughter on a November night on a Channel beach as the tide was rising. The little girl’s body was found the next day.
While admitting she had abandoned her child to exposure on a freezing night, Kabou blamed her deed on sorcery and enchantment. A court sitting in the French town of Saint-Omer didn’t buy that and locked her up for 20 years.
Director Alice Diop retells the story as the trial of Laurence Coly, clearly Kabou with but small story details changed. Rama, a French professor of literature of Senegalese extraction, has gone to Saint-Omer to write about the proceedings and Coly as a kind of modern-day Medea. Herself pregnant, Diop intersperses flashbacks to Rama’s own fraught relationship with her now-elderly mother with the trial.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
Saint Omer is a French film that picked up distinctions at the Venice International Film Festival and has hit wider distribution in the United States. It’s based on the story of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese immigrant to France who committed infanticide in 2013 by leaving her 15-month daughter on a November night on a Channel beach as the tide was rising. The little girl’s body was found the next day.
While admitting she had abandoned her child to exposure on a freezing night, Kabou blamed her deed on sorcery and enchantment. A court sitting in the French town of Saint-Omer didn’t buy that and locked her up for 20 years.
Director Alice Diop retells the story as the trial of Laurence Coly, clearly Kabou with but small story details changed. Rama, a French professor of literature of Senegalese extraction, has gone to Saint-Omer to write about the proceedings and Coly as a kind of modern-day Medea. Herself pregnant, Diop intersperses flashbacks to Rama’s own fraught relationship with her now-elderly mother with the trial.
Continued below.
Slouching Toward Infanticide
The line between abortion and infanticide is growing increasingly blurred
