We

Born in France to Senegalese parents, Alice Diop has form as a documentary maker – We is her seventh doco probing the boundaries of France’s colonial legacies. She followed it with Saint Omer, a courtroom drama about a young mother charged with her child’s death, her acclaimed feature debut that some may recognise from last year’s International Film Festival.

We is a disparate set of vignettes taken from inhabitants of an area served by the RER-B train line running from Paris out to the south-west countryside. The subjects range from two guys on a rural bird shoot to a novelist, to an impoverished Diop’s own sister, who works in a care home closer to the city, and they engage in reflective conversations with Diop about everything from their own background to their views on French art and literature. While the interviews are engaging, Diop’s project is initially obscure, before shifting into a deeper meditation on themes that she has returned to throughout her career.

“Diop’s small but potent act of subversion, in choosing disparate lives and moments that could seem linked by a railway line and nothing more, is not just to enlarge the idea of who is meant by the collective French ‘We.’ It is also to reclaim the selection process for inclusion within that tiny, divided pronoun.” Jessica Kiang, Variety