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 filmmaker. Her short and medium length films were selected and awarded prizes in several festivals, include Les Sénégalaises Et La Sénégauloise (2007), La Mort De Danton (2011), La Permanence (2016) and Towards Tenderness (2016), which won the César for Best Short Film in 2017. Her feature length documentary We (2021) won the Best Documentary Award as well as Best Film in the Encounters section at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. Her most recent film, Saint Omer, is Diop’s feature length fiction film debut. The film premiered in-competition at the 79th Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize along with the Luigi De Laurentiis Lion of the Future award.