Series Site
September 3–18, 2026
Alice Diop is one of the most significant filmmakers working in France today. Diop’s cinema is rooted in Seine-Saint-Denis, the suburban department on the outskirts of Paris where she grew up—a world largely absent from French screens. Her films counter the collective imaginary that has long defined territories like Seine-Saint-Denis, offering instead an intimate, granular account of the lives lived within them. Across eight documentaries and her debut fiction film, Saint Omer (2022), she has crafted a cinema of formal rigor and ethical commitment, attending to the overlapping pressures of racial, economic, geographic, and gendered exclusion.
In conjunction with her residency at UC Berkeley as 2026–27 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Pajus Distinguished Visitor in French Studies, BAMPFA presents a retrospective of Diop’s films. In a 2022 interview with Bedatri D. Choudhury, Diop spoke of discovering cinema’s potential “as a tool for historical, sociological, political, anthropological reflection” through filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman. However, she explained, it took her “a long time to admit to myself that I was a filmmaker because—coming from where I come from, as a woman, as a Black woman, as a person who’s not an industry insider . . . there was nothing in place to make me feel legitimate. I entered cinema as a kind of a pirate, as a way to deal with my rage, my melancholy, my pain, my sadness, my despair at inhabiting a society that refused to look at me and at my family. And at people like us.” Diop’s extraordinary work is changing that one frame at a time.
—Maya Sidhu and Kate MacKay, Film Curator