Julia Ducournau (Paris, 41 years old) made history: she won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, becoming the second female filmmaker to win such a prestigious award in seventy years (only Jane Campion had done it before for The piano, in 1993 and shared with a man). The award had even more merit because it was obtained with a film of purity body horrorTitan, in which we start from the more physical and visceral side to denounce violence against women and energize gender identity. Four years after touring the world with her titanium-addicted protagonist, the French filmmaker returned to the Croisette last May with her new film, Alpha, which arrives in Spanish cinemas on November 14th after the opening in Sitges. In it he continues to distort the conventions of horror and fantasy to, on the one hand, reclaim a forgotten generation silenced by the AIDS pandemic; and, on the other, talk about the possibility of letting go and breaking symbiotic bonds.
“Alpha It’s a film I’ve been working on for a long time, even before Titan, “But I put it off because I wanted to be wiser, to have more experience,” she explains. And after the success of his previous film, and with the experience gained with Rawher first feature film, in which she also dealt with physical violence against women (she always says that her parents’ profession, doctors, had an impact on her imagination), she felt compelled to push herself into other territories. “The place of creation is an uncomfortable place: it’s where interesting things are found,” he says. From there he imagined Alpha a virus that transforms infected people into marble statues, “like sacred ones”, says the director, whose muscles, bones and organs petrify until they fracture. Its protagonist, called Alpha, is a 13-year-old girl who believes she has been infected, with a doctor mother (Golshifteh Farahani) dedicated to taking care of everyone despite suffering all her life from a drug-addicted and sick brother (Tahar Rahim). Here, more than before, Ducournau uses dialogues, words… «There is something that has never been said: how society treated the sick and their families out of shame, out of fear», he explains. And since “you have to give a name to things, it’s the only way to break the trauma. It was very difficult, because I’m always afraid that words reduce the emotional intensity or, even worse, explain it, but I wanted the film to be extremely emotional.”
Ducournau with his Alpha coincided in Cannes with her and Carla Simón Pilgrimage, Both from a personal and cinematic point of view denounce the same ostracism. “Maybe there’s something generational, about all of us who have lived through it, and even if it’s not comparable, maybe Covid has awakened something in us. And it’s as if now the dam has opened and all this comes out. I love when it happens, because it means that, independently, we all feel the need to talk about it. We’ve waited 30 years to find the words that express this suffering.”
