Alpha (2025) is the first film by the French film director Julia Ducournau that draws on her Amizagh heritage (a community indigenous to North Africa).

It explores an Amizagh family living in France dealing with intergenerational trauma, addiction and grief, while the presence of a new virus causes wider collective anxiety; it touches on a lot of themes in my work and research exploring intergenerational trauma in the Lebanese diaspora, and experiences of illness and addiction, and the way the film is shot is intimate and visceral, similar to the world I’ve tried to build through making moving-image works. The film uses body horror to express embodied experiences of illness; how the virus can be spread and who can be effected is unknown, which leads to an atmosphere of collective fear and social stigma, drawing parallels to the peak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and Covid-19. 

There are cultural differences in how they approach the virus, from the grandparents of the Amizagh family, to the mother who is a medical doctor, and feelings of disconnection when there isn’t a shared spoken language between Alpha and her grandparents— but there is also a through-line of how care is expressed through persistence and maintaining family ties, and the impacts of grief.