(Excluded) Julia Ducournau: “Alpha deals with a trans-generational trauma”
The director of Titane exclusively presents in the latest issue of first her new film in competition in Cannes 2025. Extracts.
Four years after the golden palm of Titanium,, Julia Ducournau is back in competition in Cannes with its new feature film, Alpha. The story of a young girl (Melissa Boros) who lives alone with her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) and returns from school with a mysterious tattoo on the arm. Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey and Finnegan Oldfield complete the casting of Alpha, a film that promises to dig the furrow of this young director with a style already so marked, that we had discovered with her first shock film, Severeselected at the Critics Week in 2016.
In the new issue of Firstthe 41 -year -old filmmaker presents this new long -awaited project to us, with great care. Alpha This was shown this Monday, May 19 in preview at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, May 19, and few have been released to the public so far. Apart from a few photos and an enigmatic and dark first teaser (to see at the end of the article).
Here is an extract from the interview granted to us Julia Doucournau, to be found in full in newsstands.
You said you had at some point thought that this film was “out of reach, uncomfortable, too early”. Could you tell us about this area of discomfort? Is it because it is a very personal, intimate film? For example, situating the story in a Kabyle family, we can feel that it does not come out of nowhere …
Indeed, I confirm to you that It is not opportunistic (smile)… Now, the discomfort zone, I see it first in terms of my work. Take the three films I made. Severe speaks of humanity as of a transcendence of our animality, almost a grail to reach. My character fights against his animal instincts to try to become human, like a kind of elevation. Titanium speaks of a humanity that dies but whose solution would be in a form of transhumanism or transhumanity. In the first, humanity is a point of sight. In the second, the prosthesis, the metal, are seen as a solution to its failure. In Alphathere is only our humanity, naked. Without solution, out of way. By placing myself there, I allowed myself to really refocus on emotions, love as the sole condition of the acceptance of our mortality. And that is not easy. I find myself in a total absence of distance. I no longer have the distance of the genre, even if some might say that the disease I show does not exist. But I strongly record it in the reality of the film, so I do not use the genre as a firewall but as a vector of identification with our humanity. Without this gender firewall, I had to confront my own fears.
Unless I was mistaken for Wikipedia, you were born in 1983, the year of the HIV virus. Which is not without consequence for a film which deals with a childish trauma linked to an epidemic …
At this level, the trauma was general, and it still lasts today, it is something that we have not really mourned. I am not only talking about the disease itself but of this atmosphere of fear and shame, the idea that it touched a particular fringe of the population, that the patients were sinners, that is trauma: the contamination of a fear that radically changed our future. For my generation, sex has become a considerable taboo. After the liberation of the 1970s, we experienced a total surf, an ethical surge too, in the relationship that society had to the patients, an extremely brutal humanist decline. You talk about “Envantine trauma”but for me the film deals rather with a trans-generational trauma, transferred to the next generation, and a cycle which, in the absence of mourning, will never have an end. So yes, my year of birth clearly has something to do with it, and that’s why the character is Alpha. Someone who is born in an omega world. How to be born in a world where everything dies?
In the film there is a double temporality signified by very marked photographic effects.
It was necessary to dissociate the two temporalities. Not for reasons of understanding, but to mark the difference between the two eras in their relationship to the disease. Between the past and the present of the film, everything has darkened, because even if it is no longer possible to deny the dead, people continue to deny the disease itself. For me, this denial is what is darker, and that implies this de-saturated image, very contrasting, as if we had passed at an industrial, hard, frozen age. Because denial, shame and fear inserted in society. The past, I wanted to nostalgic, we worked with my leader Op ‘Ruben Impsee to find the rendering of the Kodak disposable devices that we used a lot and which gave photos with very lively colors, almost too much.
Damn, even.
Yes, with this omnipresent yellow-green background. It was not a question of expressing an idealized nostalgia for childhood but of creating an opposition between a homogeneous image, a reflection of an era when people still made society, and the very heterogeneous image of the present of the film, where the connection was lost, carried away by fear, the pointing the finger etc. The choices of visual treatment come from there, not at all a concern for the style “Oh my God, people will not understand that we are in a flashback”. Ultimately, if my work on identification with the emotions of the characters, to the love that binds them, to the childbirth they make of themselves works, the question of temporality will not have great importance.
This aesthetic double choice leads to the fact that the two eras are topped with a form of dreamlike or unreality, which makes that the whole film is lived from the point of view of Alpha, even the scenes where it is not present, and which one can imagine that it fantasizes them.
It’s very fair and it is out in all the choices we have made. Typically, the tattoo scene, at the very beginning. She gets tattooed and then the camera moves away from her in slow motion, to visit the squat where the party takes place, while Alpha is semi-conscious, in a second state. With the sound editor, we made sure that we have the impression that his mind leaves his body and that it is he who wanders in this party. This same idea applies to many other scenes. It is undeniably the point of view of the film.
Interview by Léonard Haddad
