Raw

Julia Ducournau's Raw is the debut feature that announced one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary French horror cinema. 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 during the Toronto Midnight Madness screening became part of the film's launch story; the festival reportedly distributed sick bags afterwards as a half-joke marketing gesture.

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.

The film's critical success put Ducournau on the path to Titane, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 2021, making her only the second woman in the festival's history to win the prize and the first solo female winner. Raw is now widely treated as the foundational entry in what critics have called the new wave of French body horror, alongside the work of Coralie Fargeat and Bertrand Bonello.