Supported by the Paris Region Grant Fund, Julia Ducournau's second feature film, Titane, has won the Palme d'Or at the 74th Cannes Film Festival. Film Paris Region helped the production manager, Tatiana Bouchain, during the filming in the Region.
Although the production of French horror films is growing in France, especially since the deployment of platforms, they are still a minority on our screens: out of the 216 horror films released in France since 1998, only 21 are French (9.7%).
The director Julia Ducournau is one of its best representatives in France, she who has been exploring this classification with success and singularity since the short film Junior, which was selected at Cannes and won the People's Choice Award at the Premier Plans festival in Angers in 2011.
Her first feature film Raw was also highly acclaimed at the Cannes Film Festival where it was presented in 2016 at the Critics' Week and won the Fipresci Award. Although the film is forbidden to children under the age of 16, it has sold roughly 150,000 tickets in France and was exported to more than ten countries, including the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom, where it was a great success.
"I wanted to make a film that was a priori unappealing because of its primary violence, but in which you would become deeply attached to the characters and that you would ultimately receive as a true love story."
Julia Ducournau
Key figures
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People worked on the film in its preparation, filming and post-production302
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Days of filming in Paris Region out of 39 in all27
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Paris Region departments were used as locations4
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Days of post-production146
Synopsis
After a series of unexplained crimes, a father finds his son who has been missing for 10 years. Titane means titanium in English: A metal that is highly resistant to heat and corrosion, resulting in very hard alloys.
Filming
For Titane, the production was confronted with very specific sanitary conditions related to COVID-19, which forced it to adapt its work plan to the regulations in force.
The film was filmed in four Paris Region departments: at the Hauts-de-Seine Prefecture (92), in the town of Claye-Souilly in Seine et Marne (77), in Sevran in Seine-Saint-Denis and in Essonne (91) at the Evry Hippodrome, the Arpajon fire station and the Fleury-Mérogis Departmental Fire and Rescue School (EDIS 91)
The special effects, an essential part of this film in which the main heroine (played by the actress Agathe Rousselle) metamorphoses as the sequences progress, were handled by the Paris Region studio Mac Guff.