“Love as Resistance”: Julia Ducournau’s “Alpha” Stuns Cannes with Powerful Allegory of Generational Trauma
Julia Ducournau, the director who made history as only the second woman to win the Palme d’Or with her 2021 film “Titane,” has returned to the Cannes Film Festival‘s main competition with “Alpha,” a haunting and visceral drama about generational trauma set against the backdrop of a mysterious disease that turns its victims to marble.
The film, which premiered on May 19th to strong reactions from the festival audience, stars Mélissa Boros as the titular 13-year-old protagonist alongside Tahar Rahim, Golshifteh Farahani, Emma Mackey, and Finnegan Oldfield. During the post-screening press conference, Ducournau revealed the deeply personal nature of the project and its exploration of unconditional love as an act of resistance.
A Story of Generational Pain
“Alpha” follows a troubled teenager living with her single mother in a world where a bloodborne disease slowly calcifies its victims. When Alpha returns from school with a tattoo, her mother fears she may have contracted the illness herself.
“I wanted to try to make you feel what a trauma that transfers from generation to generation could be like, starting from the moment when pain isn’t processed, when grief isn’t completed, when death becomes taboo,” Ducournau explained during the press conference. “I sincerely believe that it’s only through acceptance, through letting go, that we can stop this cycle.”
The disease, widely interpreted as an allegory for HIV/AIDS, provides the backdrop for a story that Ducournau describes as fundamentally optimistic despite its dark imagery. “Despite the darkness of my films, I’m an eternal optimist,” she said. “I strongly believe that love is an act of resistance, and in certain moments of our lives or certain moments in history regarding society more generally, it’s the only thing we can hold onto.”
Physical Transformation and Commitment
Tahar Rahim, who plays Amin in the film, underwent a dramatic physical transformation for his role, losing 20 kilograms and spending three months working with an organisation that helps drug addicts in Paris.
“It was a challenge, but I love challenges for several reasons,” Rahim shared. “I know I need them to surpass myself.” He described his character as “almost spiritual, like a fallen angel whose wings have been cut off, lost in a world he no longer belongs to.”
Ducournau praised Rahim’s dedication: “Every time I would see him week after week, I could notice that he had integrated within himself, not even with the part but within himself, some layers of the preparation.”
A Period Piece with Contemporary Resonance
Though set in what appears to be the 1990s, Ducournau emphasised the film’s relevance to current global crises. “For me, family and society function in the same way, and I think this applies extremely strongly to what we’re experiencing today because we can sense we’re in a cycle right now. It’s a cycle that’s stunning, that’s frightening because we don’t know when it will stop.”
By setting the story in a specific historical period, Ducournau found the distance she needed to process current events. “This transposition helped me see with a distance that I absolutely don’t have today given the state of shock in which we all find ourselves.”
The film’s treatment of the disease reflects the fear and stigma that surrounded HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. “It was a time when we knew about AIDS, we knew about the horrendous body count every day… and yet everyone kept pointing fingers,” Ducournau recalled. “For many years, even decades, people kept pointing fingers saying ‘you have it, it’s your fault, it’s because of your lifestyle.’ The shame and the guilt-tripping left traces that’s not a good look on us.”
Visual and Sonic Language
Ducournau collaborated with cinematographer Ruben Impens to create visually distinct worlds for the film’s two time periods. The flashbacks feature “extremely homogeneous, unified, very saturated colors” reminiscent of 1990s Kodak disposable cameras, while the present is rendered “much colder, bluish white, extremely contrasted, to give some kind of post-industrial, very metallic and harsh” quality.
“In the flashbacks, we are aware that there is a virus, but they are not able to know which is the virus and the impact it’s going to have on society,” Ducournau explained. “At this point, the fear is already there, but society is still unified. In the present, fear has insidiously seeped into the entrails of society, and everything is falling apart.”
Sound designer Séverin Favriot described the challenge of creating the film’s aural landscape: “The cinema of Julia demands creating a reality specific to the film.” Rather than focusing on the propagation of the virus through sound as initially planned, Favriot developed a bass-heavy sonic environment that “enclosed the characters and their physical discomfort.”
Ducournau added that she wanted the audience to experience everything “from inside the body of the character of Alpha. Everything is felt from her interior, hence the violence of the sound.”
Unconventional Beauty in Death
The film’s depiction of disease victims turning to marble statues after death represents Ducournau’s attempt to honour those lost to epidemics. “It was a way to elevate the mortality of all the people that we lost in the pandemic in the ’80s and ’90s to something very sacred in a non-religious way,” she explained. “It was a way for me to make them beautiful, to build a monument to them and make them eternal.”
This approach connects to Ducournau’s philosophy about transformation: “The absence of mutation generally in life is the equivalent of death for me. If you don’t transform things, you are dead. I believe in mutation, I believe in transformation.”
A Personal Connection
Ducournau revealed that the film draws from her own heritage, with her mother being partly Berber. The film’s family dinner scene, featuring dialogue in the Berber language, comes directly from her childhood memories.
“Everything you see in the meal scene is really my childhood,” she said. “It’s a pure shot of childhood for me, and I hope that beyond the fact that they speak Berber, anyone can recognize themselves in this chaos of family meals—at once an enormous pain that nobody wants to go to, but also always a bit funny because everyone’s shouting, arguing, then laughing.”
Mélissa Boros, who plays Alpha, described the intensive physical preparation for her role, including sports training and stunt work. “The preparation was super important. We did a lot of rehearsals. We don’t arrive on set and improvise,” Boros said, thanking Ducournau for her constant guidance. “I never felt abandoned even if Julia is very demanding. When something doesn’t work, she says so; when it works, she says so.”
Looking Forward
“Alpha” is scheduled for theatrical release in France on August 20, 2025, through Diaphana Distribution, with NEON handling North American distribution. The film represents Ducournau’s third feature and what distributors FilmNation and Charades have called her “most personal, profound work.”
As the film competes for the Palme d’Or, Ducournau’s unique vision continues to challenge audiences with its blend of body horror, emotional depth, and social commentary. As she concluded in the press conference: “This is a film of fracas, a film of battle, but in no way a film of chaos. On the contrary, it’s a film that always moves forward.”
Editor in Chief of Ikon London Magazine, journalist, film producer and founder of The DAFTA Film Awards (The DAFTAs).