Paris (AFP)

The French Julia Ducournau, who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes on Saturday, is a singular and daring filmmaker, fascinated by the transformations of the body, whose transgressive cinema is borrowed from feminism.

Before "Titanium", the most violent and disturbing work of the competition, this tall 37-year-old blonde woman had already caused a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 with her first feature film, "Grave", a story of learning from a post - cannibalistic teenager who revisits the horror film.

"One of my goals has always been to bring genre cinema or" UFOs "films to general festivals to stop ostracizing a section of French production," Julia Ducournau told AFP.

"Gender also allows us to talk about the individual and very deeply about our fears and our desires."

"Grave" had been banned for children under 16 and had suiscated the discomfort when it was broadcast at the Cannes Film Festival, due to the rawness of certain bloody scenes - waxing ending with the tasting of a half-eaten finger or body discovered upon awakening.

Nothing like this with "Titanium" despite scenes that remain in memory, such as a self-mutilation of the face by the heroine who tries to make herself unrecognizable, scenes of sex with cars or a series of spectacular murders.

Nothing in this young film director with a wise-looking physique, with an intellectual career, would however suggest at first sight such a universe, tipping at times into gore.

But this daughter of cinephile doctors - father dermatologist and mother gynecologist - readily finds in her childhood the origins of this fascination for the most disturbing aspects of the human body.

"Since I was little, I heard my parents talk about medicine, without taboos. It was their daily life. I had my nose stuck in their books", she said at the time of the release of "Grave", stressing that for her, "death, decomposition were normalized".

- From Edgar Poe to Cronenberg -

Influenced by the cinema of David Cronenberg, Brian de Palma, Pier Paolo Pasolini and the South Korean Na Hong-jin ("The Chaser"), this follower of genre films also says that she was marked by the famous film by horror "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre", seen in secret at the age of six, and having had his first literary emotions with the "Extraordinary Stories" of Edgar Poe.

Born in Paris, Julia Ducournau had a studious career.

After a preparatory literary class and a double license in Modern Letters and English, she then turned to cinema in 2004, integrating the screenplay department of Fémis.

But his first works, which already deal with physical mutations, reveal his obsessions very early on.

Selected for the Critics' Week at the Cannes Film Festival, his remarkable short film "Junior" (2011), - whose heroine bears the same first name as that of "Grave", Justine, and is played by the same actress, Garance Marillier - thus shows the metamorphosis of a tomboy teenager.

Then comes "Eat" (2012), a TV movie made for Canal + and already banned for children under 16, which tells the story of a former obese woman trying to get revenge on the person who harassed her in college.

"Since La Fémis and, of course, my short film + Junior +, genre cinema is obvious to me, to talk about the body. The body that changes, that opens," she said in an interview with Télérama.

"At La Fémis, I had already made a short film about a girl who scratched herself until digging a real hole in her forehead, and it was the first time that I had resorted to special effects".

A universe that she confirms with "Titane", very carefully staged.

"She is already a great filmmaker, there is not a plan of the film that should be withdrawn," said Gilles Jacob, president of the Louis-Delluc prize, after his first film, asserting himself then "certain that he there would be a sequel ".

It's a party thing, with the top step of the podium.

© 2021 AFP