We now know what Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau is cooking up next after her very divisive "Alpha."
French author Adèle Yon tells Le Monde (via Trois Couleurs) that Ducournau reached out to her this summer about adapting "My Real Name Is Elisabeth," her autobiographical investigation into her great-grandmother. According to Yon, the film could be ready in time for Cannes 2028. That would make it Ducournau's fourth straight feature to go to the Croisette, if things move as quickly as Yon seems to think.
Yon won't be involved in the film. She called the "Titane" director a fascinating, feminist, independent artist and said she needs to move on to other things, adding that "Julia Ducournau is going to take Elisabeth somewhere else."
If you haven't heard of the book, which I hadn’t either, it's been a phenomenon in France. It has sold 282k copies, and has been translated into 21 languages.
Yon's great-grandmother Elisabeth was diagnosed with schizophrenia in post-war France and forcibly institutionalized for seventeen years at her husband's request, eventually lobotomized after years of electroshock treatment. The book is said to mix detective story, road trip, essay, recovered letters, family interviews and medical records.
You can see why Ducournau is intrigued. Inherited trauma, the body as violence, mothers and daughters haunted, that's basically "Alpha" in a nutshell, and there are subtle shades of “Titane” as well. The question is whether this ends up as straight drama or whether Ducournau pushes it into genre territory. I'd bet on the latter.
Ducournau is, of course, the filmmaker behind two strong genre films, "Raw" and "Titane," but "Alpha," which premiered at Cannes last year, left people with mixed feelings. As I wrote uuat the time, it was “the kind of film you admire even as it leaves you emotionally stranded." Still, this next film feels like the right kind of swing.
More to come, I’m sure, as the cast gets assembled for “My Real Name is Elisabeth” in preparation for what looks like a 2027 shoot.
Universal has finally put a name on the fourth Mummy movie. It's called “The Mummy: Book of the Dead,” there’s a release date: October 15, 2027, basically a year from today.