Titane

Julia Ducournau's Titane won the Palme d'Or at the 74th Cannes Film Festival in July 2021, only the second time in the festival's history that a woman has won the top prize, after Jane Campion's win for The Piano in 1993. Ducournau is also the first solo female winner of the prize in Cannes' history; Campion had shared her award with Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine. The win was widely treated as a generational moment for European genre cinema and for the long campaign for greater representation of female directors at the festival.

The film is Ducournau's second feature, after Raw (2016), which had premiered in Critics' Week at Cannes five years earlier. The screenplay is by Ducournau alone. The lead, Agathe Rousselle, is a Parisian model and DJ in her screen debut; Ducournau has been outspoken in interviews about casting Rousselle deliberately outside the conventional acting-school pipeline and about working extensively with her on the very physical demands of the central role across an unusually long pre-production period.

The supporting cast pairs Rousselle with Vincent Lindon (one of France's most consistent leading men since the early 1980s) and Garance Marillier, the lead from Raw, in a small role. Cinematography is by Ruben Impens, who had also shot Raw, The Broken Circle Breakdown and Beautiful Boy; the score is by Jim Williams (also Raw). The film was shot in Paris and across France over forty-five days. Titane was acquired by Neon for the U.S. market and grossed over $5 million theatrically, a substantial outcome for a French-language genre film with extreme content and a near-zero existing star presence in the United States.