Titane sheds light on maverick director’s controversial styl

French film director Julia Ducournau, who on Saturday won the Cannes festival’s top prize for Titane, developed a taste for skin-crawling bodily transformations early on in life thanks to her parents, both doctors.

Exploding into the spotlight at just 34 with her debut feature film Raw, Ducournau quickly established herself as a singular and audacious filmmaker.

The coming-of-age tale with a gory twist, featuring a teenage cars and kills without a care, was much the same, with critics shielding their eyes during several scenes.

Getting a horror film shortlisted for the top prize at Cannes was in itself a success, she told AFP during the first week of the festival. “I’ve always wanted to bring genre cinema or outlandish films to mainstream festivals so this part of French movie production would stop being ostracised,” she said.

The polished appearance of Ducournau, now 39, appears in stark contrast to the messy array of gore seen in her films.

“Even as a little girl, I w hear my parents talk ab medical topics without ta That was their job. I like stick my nose in their boo she said while promoting R

Ducournau was vis pleased at Cannes’s Titane n conference when a critic c pared her film to David Cro berg’s Crash and David Lyn Blue Velvet. She also cites B de Palma, Pier Paolo Pas and Na Hong-jin as influen

When she was only six, watched The Texas Chain Massacre in secret and, gro up, devoured the chilling go