Julia Ducournau, the Palme d’Or Director Who Made Flinching a Language

Julia Ducournau

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 18, 1983 Paris, France
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Raw, Titane, Alpha
Awards	Palme d'Or · FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes Critics' Week · Sutherland Trophy, BFI London Film Festival · Prix Louis Delluc · Petit Rail d'Or, Cannes Film Festival

Somewhere in the second half of a Julia Ducournau film, a body does something it should not do, and a room full of strangers decides, one seat at a time, whether to keep looking. A vegetarian student tastes raw meat and cannot stop. A woman made pregnant by a car starts leaking motor oil. That second image won her the Palme d’Or, the first time a woman had taken the top prize at Cannes alone, and it fixed her in the public mind as the director who makes audiences faint. Then came Alpha, the first of her films that the Cannes press turned against. The question her career is asking now is whether the flinch was ever the point.

The daughter of a gynaecologist and a dermatologist, Ducournau grew up in Paris, and she traces her whole cinema back to the family table. Doctors, she told The Guardian, “have this very upfront yet distant way of talking about bodies and death.” Her camera talks the same way: close, unhurried, unwilling to look away and equally unwilling to gloat.

She studied screenwriting at La Fémis, the Paris film school, and her first short, Junior, already contained the method. A girl named Justine, played by Garance Marillier, catches a stomach bug and begins to shed her skin like a snake. The film won the Petit Rail d’Or at Cannes in 2011, when its director, born in Paris on 18 November 1983, was 27. A year later she co-directed the television film Mange with Virgile Bramly, the story of a recovering bulimic who goes after the woman who tormented her at university.

Marillier came back as another Justine for Raw, the first feature, developed through the TorinoFilmLab and shown in the Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2016. Raised vegetarian, Justine arrives at veterinary school, where her older sister Alexia, played by Ella Rumpf, is already a student, and a hazing ritual ends with a hunger she cannot name. Raw took the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes, the Sutherland Trophy in London and the Prix Louis Delluc for a first film. What travelled furthest, though, was a report from Toronto that two viewers had fainted during a screening. Ducournau kept steering interviewers back to what it means to be human, and named David Lynch‘s The Elephant Man as her idea of humanity’s essence.

Titane pushed the same question to its limit. Agathe Rousselle plays Alexia, a dancer with a titanium plate in her skull who kills without much reason, conceives a child with a car and then hides from the police by passing herself off as the long-lost son of a fire captain, played by Vincent Lindon. At Cannes in July 2021, Spike Lee’s jury gave it the Palme d’Or, though Lee blurted out the winner at the start of the ceremony rather than at the end. Ducournau became the second woman to win the prize, after Jane Campion took it for The Piano in 1993, and the first to win it unshared, since Campion had split hers with Chen Kaige. A BAFTA nomination for best director followed, and Neon took the film to American cinemas. Between features she directed two episodes of Servant, M. Night Shyamalan‘s Apple TV+ series, and two more of The New Look.

She has never liked the frame the victory came in. “When people say I’m a woman director, I mean, that’s always a bit annoying, because I’m a person,” she told IndieWire. She prefers another label for her films: queer, she has said, “in the first sense of the word,” meaning work that refuses the norm.

The trouble started with the third film. Ducournau has said she threw away a first draft because she caught herself repeating what Raw and Titane had already said. What she made instead was Alpha, about a thirteen-year-old girl, played by Mélissa Boros, who comes home with a homemade tattoo in a city where a bloodborne epidemic slowly turns the infected into marble. Golshifteh Farahani plays her mother, a doctor; Tahar Rahim, who lost 20 kilos for the part, plays the uncle who keeps overdosing. The disease reads plainly as AIDS, and the film is the most personal she has made. It premiered in competition at Cannes on 19 May 2025, received a long ovation in the room and then drew some of the harshest notices of the festival. David Ehrlich of IndieWire called it her “first unambiguous misfire”; Peter Bradshaw gave it one star in The Guardian. Vogue predicted a future cult classic, a minority view. The irony is that Alpha is the film in which she did what her critics had always asked, turning down the shock to let grief carry the story, and it is the one they found overwrought. The reading of Ducournau as a provocateur who needs a gimmick misses this: her films were always built on feeling, and the body horror was the scaffolding that kept the feeling from turning sentimental. Take the scaffolding away and the structure shows. She has said that all her work, back to the first short, has divided people, and that bad reviews bother her less than anyone imagines.

Alpha opened in France in August 2025 and reached North American cinemas through Neon in 2026. By then she had already moved on to a different screen. In May 2026 Mylène Farmer released “C’est à qui le tour”, the first single from her album Égrégore, with a video directed by Ducournau, a nocturnal piece set in a club where every kiss is blurred out. The connection runs back to that 2021 jury: Farmer sat on it, as did Tahar Rahim, and both ended up working with the director they had crowned.

The next feature is already chosen. In October 2026 it emerged that Ducournau will adapt Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth, Adèle Yon’s 2025 bestseller about her great-grandmother Betsy, interned for dementia in the 1950s and kept in psychiatric institutions for years. The book has sold 282,000 copies in France and been translated into 21 languages. “I had received many offers from directors, but I only wanted her,” Yon told Le Monde, adding that she will play no part in the film. The shoot is expected next year. It is a story about doctors deciding what a woman’s body and mind are allowed to be, which is the conversation Ducournau has been overhearing since childhood, and this time the horror will not need inventing.