Raw

Julia Ducournau's Raw was her debut feature, and it marked her out straight away as a distinctive voice in contemporary French horror. It premiered in Cannes' Critics' Week in 2016, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize, and went on to take the Sutherland Award for Most Original First Feature at the BFI London Film Festival the same year. Reports of audience members fainting at the Toronto Midnight Madness screening became part of its launch story, and the festival reportedly handed out sick bags afterwards, half as a joke and half as marketing.

Garance Marillier plays the lead (Ducournau cast her as a teenager, and would cast her again across her later projects) alongside Ella Rumpf and Rabah Naït Oufella. The film was a Belgian-French co-production shot at the École Nationale Vétérinaire d'Alfort in Maisons-Alfort and at a real veterinary school campus in Liège. Cinematography is by Ruben Impens, who would shoot Ducournau's follow-up Titane, and the score is by Jim Williams.

Its critical success put Ducournau on the path to Titane, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2021 and made her only the second woman in the festival's history to win the prize, and the first to win it alone. Raw is now treated as the starting point of a new wave of French body horror, one that also takes in the work of Coralie Fargeat and Bertrand Bonello.