Connecting Black Poets Across Europe and America: Alice Diop & Omar Berrada
On April 19, join us 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.
The conversation will be held in English. It is free with RSVP. Click here for tickets.
Alice Diop, 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, attended the documentary film workshop at La Fémis. Since 2005, she has been making documentaries that have been selected by international festivals (Cinéma du Réel, BFI London, Karlovy Vary, Viennale). In 2017, she won a César for Best Short Film with Vers la tendresse and the Grand Prix at the Brive Film Festival. 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 won the Best Documentary Award and the Encounters Award. Her first feature-length fiction film, Saint Omer, selected in competition at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival, won 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 chosen to represent France at the 2022 Academy Awards®. Credit Image: Aurélie Lamachère.
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 posthumous history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020); and Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (2024). Credit image: Ilze Wolff