Watch ‘Titane’ Palme d’Or Winner Julia Ducournau’s Twisted Debut Short ‘Junior’
French filmmaker Julia Ducournau is poised to become one of the biggest sensations in international genre filmmaking thanks to her surprise Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or win last weekend for “Titane.” That film took the festival’s top prize from a jury led by Spike Lee, and will next be released in the United States by Neon on October 1 in theaters.
Fans may remember her 2016 stomach-twisting debut feature “Raw,” but five years before that Ducournau directed a short film titled “Junior.” This amazingly disturbing short centers on a 13-year-old tomboy whose body becomes home to a startling metamorphosis. Courtesy of Unifrance you can now watch the full short in full below.
IndieWire recently interviewed Ducournau about her shocking feature “Titane,” following an erotic dancer who becomes impregnated by a Cadillac and is also a serial killer. “I can tell you that I do try to create affiliation between my films,” she said. “If you look at it from the outside, when you finish one you move on to the other one. It’s a new phenomenon every time, but I have tried to make it a continuous gesture. It’s like the same film. My characters are just growing up. That’s how I feel. You have some small Easter eggs in my films, from ‘Junior’ to ‘Raw’ to ‘Titane,’ some details in the sets that are the same and some costumes that are the same. I’ll take one picture that I put in another movie, like a fireman, and use it in this one. I’m too sentimental.”
From IndieWire’s review of “Titane” out of the Cannes Film Festival, which deems the movie one of the wildest to ever screen at the fest: “Following the cannibalistic ‘Raw’ with another ravenous film that pushes her fascination with the hunger and malleability of human flesh to even further extremes, Ducournau has made good on the promise of her debut and then some. Whatever you’re willing to take from it, there’s no denying that ‘Titane’ is the work of a demented visionary in full command of her wild mind; a shimmering aria of fire and metal that introduces itself as the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’ and Shinya Tsukamoto’s ‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’ before shapeshifting into a modern fable about how badly people just need someone to take care of them and vice-versa.”