‘I film to keep a memory’: Autobiography as a collective experience and production of alterities in Nous, by Alice Diop

This article presents an analysis of the film Nous by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alice Diop, focusing on two aesthetic-formal elements: mise en scène and editing. By considering specific aesthetic resources activated in the movie, such as the shift from the confessional to the essayistic use of autobiography from a perspective that centres the collective, we analyse the dynamics between the individual and the collective engendered by the narrative. Drawing on theoretical contributions on the film essay, as well as notes on documentary mise en scène and alterity by Jean-Louis Comolli, and Walter Benjamin’s notions of the communicability of experience and narrative, we examine the relations Diop establishes between the daily lives of racialized inhabitants of the banlieues of Paris and White French people. This perspective highlights the identity complexities in contemporary France and questions, ultimately, who is part of the ‘we’ to which the film’s title refers.