Julia Ducournau
Filmmaker
April → July 2023
"Everything comes from something very personal – I’m not going to tell you what, but I can tell you that I’m everywhere in my films. None of them are autobiographical, but it all stems from something that I have in me."
My name is Julia Ducournau. As I’m typing, I’m a 39-year-old woman, I make films.
“When I was in film school, I started directing small shorts — like everyone — and I actually realized that I did not want someone else to direct something that I had written. For me, it was a continuity. When I write, I write very precisely. I write about the light, I write about the costumes, I write about the song that you have to hear at this moment. But I write about everything.”
“Who cares what I do on a daily basis, or what I am, or whatever. The only thing that counts is the art, my films – they’re my only true way of expressing myself, and after that, I’ve said it all. And then you take it, and you make it your own – and that’s how we communicate.”
“Everything comes from something very personal – I’m not going to tell you what, but I can tell you that I’m everywhere in my films. None of them are autobiographical, but it all stems from something that I have in me".
ALPHA represents the origin and birth, in contrast with the Omega, the end, death. But an origin also implies the notion of a threshold, and thus of a transition or passage. The Alpha is an empty and desolate liminary space, but one that is simultaneously filled with the past and future that it harbors. In this sense, it is a space of discomfort, forever doomed to be something other than what it is.
Alpha is the name of my protagonist. At 11, she is the incarnation of this liminary space: she’s not exactly a child anymore, but she’s not an adult either. She’s neither one nor the other. And yet she’s very much there.
Essentially, I believe that is her destiny to escape transition, to draw her own outlines and find her wholeness. To do this, she will have to experience her mortality for the first time. Death as finality, as opposed to the notion of transition. But despite her assumed name, Alpha is still her parents’ child, a link in a chain of heredity, and what she will go through is a death as inheritance, as the condition of one family member being transferred onto her own body.
As with my previous films, ALPHA takes place in a world born from my imagination, in a city-product of several real-world locations, including New York City.
I instinctively began writing the script in English, because my film takes place in the context of a global tragedy. New York, a city scarred by trauma, is nonetheless a space of resilience where destruction and reconstruction follow in succession.
My visit here will give me the opportunity to meet one of the founding members of Act Up, a witness to the earliest devastations of AIDS in the 1980s, a psychiatrist specializing in intergenerational trauma, and a hypnotherapist working on past life regression.