‘The dream is to be a standup, but everyone who knows me says: Please don’t’ – Riz Ahmed on chaos, comedy, and defying categorisation

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His multi-hyphenate career has made him one of Britain’s most versatile recognisable stars – but hasn’t stopped him facing some seriously awkward moments… Riz Ahmed was multitasking. It was February in London, and the actor was doing an interview with a men’s magazine en route to collect his kid from school. So far, so starry. “Here’s the reality,” says Ahmed today, palms slamming down hard on the table. “I’m late for the school run. I’m stuck in traffic. I’m meant to be at my laptop, but I’m having to do it on my phone, in my car. I’m double parked on a double yellow line, doing the interview, looking over my shoulder. The traffic warden’s coming, it’s rush hour. He tries to move me along. I try to get out of there while I’m talking on the phone to this guy.” Distracted, Ahmed hit another car. The driver jumped out of his vehicle, incensed. “He’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’” says Ahmed, who had been attempting to continue the interview. “I’m now going off video, like, ‘Oh,...
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Best films of 2023 in the UK: No 7 – Saint Omer

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Alice Diop’s award-winning courtroom drama doubles as an unsentimental study in empathy with one of the year’s most mesmerising performances

At this year’s Venice film festival, Alice Diop’s unblinking stunner Saint Omer was handed the prize for best debut film – a reward that would have seemed inadequate if it hadn’t shortly afterwards taken the grand prix in the main competition, and inaccurate under any circumstances. Diop’s film is only a debut if you’re happy to disregard documentary as a lesser branch of cinema that somehow doesn’t count; as her first dramatic feature, Saint Omer merely extends the clear-eyed gaze and burning social interest of her non-fiction work into new narrative terrain, with nary a tremor of uncertainty. Films like We showed Diop has form in braiding truth, storytelling and intense human scrutiny; Saint Omer isn’t so very different.

The surprise is that Diop’s entry into fiction takes the form of a courtroom drama, among the most rigidly procedural and rule-bound genres in the medium – only to strip it of its expected structures and rhythms, centring disordered interior feeling amid unyielding legal process. The case, drawn from a real-life 2016 headline-maker in France, is stark and horrifying: legally straightforward, perhaps, but psychologically tumultuous. Young Senegalese Frenchwoman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda, often scarcely moving a muscle while giving one of the year’s most mesmerising performances) is accused of murdering her infant daughter. She doesn’t deny the act, but claims sorcery was to blame, sticking calmly to her story over days of frustrating testimony – shot by Claire Mathon with penetrating stillness, allowing the viewer to take in her micro-shifts in expression and intonation, her consistency of comportment, her occasionally lofty turns of phrase, as she repeats her awful confession over and over.

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