2021 Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau returns to the Cannes Film Festival this year, but not in competition. Instead, Variety reports that she’ll be on the Croisette shopping her next project, entitled “Alpha,” with FilmNation and Charades handling its sales.
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There’s no plot details yet for “Alpha,” but the film stars Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim, two actors who, like Ducournau, are modern Cannes legends in their own right. Rahim’s career took off after “A Prophet” wowed audiences at the festival in 2009, while Farahini starred in Jim Jarmusch‘s “Paterson,” which premiered at the festival’s 2016 edition. But Ducournau is practically Cannes royalty after becoming the second woman (after Jane Campion) to win the Palme d’Or for “Titane” in 2021. Since then, Justine Triet also won Cannes’ top prize, but Docournau’s victory felt particularly stunning, given how divisive her last movie was.
And expect “Alpha” to be as subversive, violent, and grimly hilarious as Ducournau’s previous two films. “Raw,” her 2016 debut, followed a young French veterinary student who realizes she has an appetite for human flesh. “Titane” pushed Ducournau’s taste for body horror to even further, as a murderous young woman with a fetish for cars goes into hiding disguised as the son of a fireman who disappeared years earlier. Whatever Ducournau has in mind for “Alpha,” expect her to push her vision to new extremes. And that’s what FilmNation and Charades tease in their statement about the film, calling it “Julia’s most personal, profound work yet.”
What else do we know about “Alpha”? Eric and Nicolas Altmayer lead producers through Madarin & Compagnie, as do Jean des Forêts and Amélie Jacquis through Petit Film. Jean-Yves Roubin and Cassandre Warnauts also co-produce though Frakas Productions. “”Alpha” is a new page in Julia Ducournau’s corpus that is both very consistent with the previous ones and entirely new in its tone,” said the producers in a statement. “To match an exceptional project, it was necessary to transcend conventions, as evidenced by the exceptional combination of producers on one hand and international sales companies on the other.”
Whatever “Alpha” has in store for audiences, it will be the hottest film on the Cannes market this year thanks to Ducournau’s history at the festival. And considering “Raw” and “Titane” were Cannes premieres, expect “Alpha” in competition for the Palme d’Or next year.