Discovering Julia Ducournau

Alpha, the latest film by Julia Ducournau, is premiering in Spain. The director has presented her three films to date at the Sitges Film Festival. Three members of our selection committee reveal her filmmaking through these fascinating, diverse, and interesting works.

Raw: "At the 50th edition of the Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival, a young Julia Ducournau made her debut with her first short film, Junior, which featured a tweener in the midst of a process of transformation. The elements of genre, and specifically body horror, were used to weave a charming story about the changes inherent in puberty. The leading actress, Garance Marillier, was then just a child, but she would return to play the lead role in the French director's feature film debut, Raw.

However, the lead actress was not the only point in common between the two films. Both portrayed stories set in academic environments - high school and university, respectively - with two sisters coinciding in time and showing the class hierarchies between newcomers and veterans. They also shared a transformation of their bodies or appetites that viewers contemplate with a blend of fascination and terror: whether it be body horror in the form of skin and fluids detaching from the body in Junior or the cannibalistic voracity of Raw. Furthermore, the main character has the same name, Justine, as if the short film and feature film were weaving the same biography of horror and sensuality.

In short, Raw established Julia Ducournau as a cult filmmaker within the fantastic community, and recovering Junior only serves to expand the details of that universe of bodily transformation that is as visceral as it is feminine." By Mònica Garcia i Massagué.

Titane: "When Julia Ducournau picked up the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Titane, she was the first to admit that her film wasn't perfect. She could also have added that she didn't want it to be. After all, if you're telling the story of a psychopath who gets knocked up by a car, Apollonian balance isn't going to be part of your roadmap. In fact, the most exciting thing about Ducournau's second solo feature film is the feeling that, at a certain point, the leading lady takes the helm from the director and steers the story in directions as unexpected and aberrant as the central character's own new flesh: pure liquid metal." By Gerard Casau.

Alpha: “Alpha, or Julia Ducournau refining her visual and narrative style and making it explode when textures are dislocated and diluted, allowing the modèle fantastique of her filmmaking to overflow. Alpha is cinema suspended in timeless chaos, fury unleashed in frames that are sometimes incongruous, but always leave their mark at the end of the screening. Abrupt, personal, and strictly unique, Ducournau's new production is the work of an auteur with a capital A, who continues to represent the most fertile path in contemporary French cinema and a fantastic genre that survives certain erratic criticism, concentrated in the noisy corridors of Cannes, as did other auteurs in their day, such as Claire Denis with Trouble Every Day, Olivier Assayas with Demonlover, David Robert Mitchell with Under the Silver Lake, and Nicolas Winding Refn with The Neon Demon." By Ángel Sala