How Do You Follow Up a Wild Cannes Winner Like ‘Titane’?

Coming out of the gate with movies like Raw and Titane—galvanizingly strange, graphic, and darkly funny films about young women dealing with animalistic cravings for human flesh and vintage Cadillacs, respectively—would set a high bar for any director. Julia Ducournau learned this the hard way when she sat down to write her third feature film. She got pretty deep into an original script before tearing it to shreds. “I realized that I was saying something I’d already said in my two previous films,” Ducournau tells me. “I got bored with it—and annoyed with myself for allowing myself to stay in that comfort zone.”

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For Titane, Ducournau became the first female director to win the coveted Palme d’Or in nearly 30 years (going back to Jane Campion for The Piano). Now all eyes are on her next act, which premieres next week at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

But don’t take the filmmaker’s struggle to figure out her third movie as a sign of the pressure getting to her. “It’s not something that I keep in mind,” the Paris native says of the Palme. “From film to film, I always feel like I can go further in the way I expose myself, which is incredibly hard to do.”

After tossing her initial script, Ducournau decided to finally follow through on an idea she’d been noodling with for years. In some ways, it would require her to reintroduce herself as a director—stripping the loud genre conventions that shaped her earlier work, while delving deeper into the themes and imagery that have increasingly defined her sensibility.

Alpha, like her previous films, centers on a young woman—its eponymous 13-year-old heroine, played by Mélissa Boros. Once again, it also puts visceral, nightmarish focus on matters of the human body. But in this case, Ducournau’s lens is more potently allegorical. Her film imagines a fictitious epidemic closely inspired by the AIDS crisis. Toggling between the ’80s and ’90s, we follow Alpha; her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), a doctor treating dying patients; and her uncle, Amin (Tahar Rahim), who’s battling the mysterious disease. When Alpha impulsively gets a tattoo at a party, she’s stigmatized by her classmates for what she may have contracted. Her mother goes into panic mode. Her world feels as if it’s collapsing.

In many ways, the terrain feels familiar to Ducournau. “How are you born into the world when everything is dying? That’s the question of the film,” the director says. “Alpha comes from this love that I have for this very transitional, uncomfortable space. It has to do with your body changing, specific smells, your own habitat—being between an animal and a human. It’s something I find incredibly human.” But unlike her previous films, Alpha is not quite body horror. The gore feels more internal; the drama, more sincere.

“When we talk about bodies, you’re talking about my own vulnerability. This did give way to a path toward more emotions, because I completely got rid of the distance imposed by genre,” Ducournau says. “It’s a way to expose myself more—and to expose yourself more, I hope, in the same way.”

Ducournau was only a bit younger than Alpha when she too came of age during the AIDS epidemic. “What I remember is the contamination of fear, the shaming of the whole part of a population, and the way society refused to take this on itself and to admit that it concerns all of us,” she says. “We’ve all tried to protect children, though it’s a lost cause—the reactions of fear are everywhere. This is a reflection about how this fear has been transmitted, and the impact it’s had on my generation.”

The fictional virus, which goes unnamed in the movie, causes its victims to stiffen and take a shape modeled on recumbent effigies that go back thousands of years.

“These are the saints and kings, frozen in marble in cathedrals, who have been struck by a violent death,” Ducournau says. “That cycle of pain has been repeating itself and transferring onto the next generations. This idea of recumbent effigies is something I felt was incredibly cinematic…. Although we know they’re not real, they look like humans, and so we can relate to them. There’s something that is so immediate in our empathy…within this image, where you have literally the association within one person of life and death at the same time.”

If this makes it sound like the movie takes a hard sci-fi turn—with bodies hardening and hollowing out, bizarrely transforming as the disease progresses—the effect is pretty much the opposite. Ducournau imagines the bodies as a kind of physical monument to all those lost in the epidemic; the images are haunting but grounded—even sacred. Her actors were covered in head-to-toe silicone prosthetics before visual-effects work created the sense of hard, dense material, the bodies reflecting light like polished marble. “It was a very hard process,” Ducournau admits. “It’s the memory of everyone that we’ve lost, that we’ve had to let go. The film is so much about the difficulty of letting go.”

Alpha’s eyes are opened up as she’s ostracized after potentially contracting the virus. This is a story about what it means to emancipate from your mother, a departure from Ducournau’s past focus on fathers and daughters. That’s one of the aspects of the story that scared her the most. “When you’re talking about a father, it’s mainly about losing the idea of being validated in someone’s eyes,” she says. “With mothers, it’s really about tearing away from a symbiotic bond and a fusion—which is way, way harder to do.”

Yet there’s also a kind of wonder in Alpha’s forced development. She engages in her own desires and emotions. She sees people differently. She’s more exposed to the marginalized, including the queer community, who still palpably feel the scars of the AIDS epidemic.

“How can I talk about this without talking about the LGBTQIA community?” Ducournau says. “It’s impossible. It was obvious to me that I needed to talk about the people harmed by the way society treated them.”

While Ducournau fully embraces the messy, at times painful mother-daughter dynamic at the story’s center, the heart and hope of the story is the relationship between Alpha and her uncle, Amin. When Amin first comes to live with her, Alpha is flatly terrified. “He looks the way he looks, and it’s disgusting to her,” Ducournau says. But gradually, Amin emerges as the only truth-teller in her life. Rahim, who reportedly lost dozens of pounds to play the role, portrays him with moving, at times ecstatic vibrancy. Ducournau lights the character like an angel, his cracked statuesque frame managing to find the light in darkness.

“He says the truth very bluntly, like a kid would. He helps her grow up, he helps her cry,” Ducournau says. Even though Alpha and Amin are related, they also become one another’s chosen family. “I like the idea that relationships in family are not granted. You have to tame each other, and you have to grow together to build a bond,” she says. “This is how you become a family. It’s not just by blood.”

Every choice Ducournau made in Alpha was made meticulously and with tremendous feeling. “We still have not grieved these losses,” she says. We’re speaking just days after she finished the film, and she’s nervous about unveiling it to the world. “I’m still in this floating moment, where you haven’t completely abandoned it and you’re not sure you’re ready to show it,” she says. While Alpha may technically be less bloody than Raw and Titane, you sense that Ducournau has put more of her own guts into it. It’s a vulnerable film, one that inches the audience even closer to this artist’s interior life.

Ducournau spent years wondering if she was old or experienced enough to make this movie. Then she wondered if she was brave enough. She doesn’t mind dividing audiences, leaving them uncomfortable, so long as she knows she went as far as she could. “With each film, I’m thinking that I can put myself in a more vulnerable place, in order to relate to the audience more and more,” she says. “And I’m not done digging. It’s an eternal path: How can I be more sincere? How can I get closer to my emotions? How can I show them in a more precise way, with more generosity? To me, that is the only path. That’s why I make films.”

This story is part of Awards Insider’s in-depth Cannes coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the event’s biggest names. Stay tuned for more Cannes stories as well as a special full week of Little Gold Men podcast episodes, recorded live from the festival and publishing every day.

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