Count on Julia Ducournau to leave Cannes speechless.
The French director, who shocked and stunned the world’s biggest film festival in 2021 when her body horror masterpiece Titane won the Palme d’Or, returned with her latest genre-mash up, Alpha.
Ducourau walked the red carpet with her cast, including Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani and Emma Mackey, with Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche and actress Vicky Krieps also in attendance.
While considerably less violent and provocative than her Palme d’Or winner Titane, Alpha proved just as moving, with several of the castmembers drying their eyes as the house lights came up.
Tahar Rahim and Emma Mackey co-star.
You can be sure Julia Ducournau will leave Cannes stunned.
With her most recent genre-mashup, Alpha, the French director who stunned the world’s largest film festival in 2021 with her body horror masterpiece Titane, which took home the Palme d’Or, has returned.
Ducourau walked the red carpet alongside her cast, which included Emma Mackey, Golshifteh Farahani, and Tahar Rahim. Actress Vicky Krieps and Juliette Binoche, the president of the Cannes jury, were also present.
Ducournau and her team received a lot of cheers and enthusiastic applause from the Cannes audience for the AIDS-coded horror drama about a mysterious virus and the social exclusion and fear it causes. Several cast members dried their eyes as the house lights came up, demonstrating how moving Alpha was, despite being far less violent and provocative than her Palme d’Or winner Titane. Melissa Boros, who plays the title character Alpha, Farahani, who plays her mother, and Rahim, who plays her uncle, a virus-infected junkie, received especially loud applause.
The cheers for Ducournau, however, were the loudest. She received a strong 11-minute standing ovation from the home crowd, who kept encouraging her.
Following Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old living with her single mother, who is shunned by her peers due to a rumor that she has contracted a new disease, the 1980s set Alpha imagines a fictional epidemic that is heavily influenced by the AIDS crisis. The world falls apart for her and her mother when she gets home from school one day with a tattoo on her arm. Alpha, played by newcomer Mélissa Boros, has a mother played by Golshifteh Farahani. Emma Mackey and Tahar Rahim are co-stars.
