French screenwriter and director Alice Diop was born in 1979. After studying history and visual sociology at the Sorbonne, she began her career as a documentary f ilmmaker. Her short and medium-length films, which have been selected for and awarded prizes at numerous festivals, include Les Sénégalaises et la Sénégauloise (2007), La Mort de Danton (2011), La Permanence (2016) and Towards Tenderness (2016), which won the César Award for Best Short Film in 2017. Diop’s featurelength documentary We (2020) won the Encounters Award for Best Film in at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2021. Saint Omer is her feature-length fiction f ilm debut.