NEON has set a theatrical release date for its Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner Titane, the distributor’s second after Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 Parasite which continued on to win a historical Best Picture at the Oscars for a foreign film. Titane will hit theaters on Oct. 1. NEON obtained Titane back in September 2019.
The pic, directed and written by French producer Julia Ducournau, follows a series of unexplained crimes; a dad is brought together with the child who has been absent for 10 years. The pic in its logline is likewise charged as “Titane : A metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys.” Ducournau became the second female producer to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes history after Jane Campion with 1993’s The Piano.
Ducournau disclosed to Deadline that the first seed of her story, which includes a psychopathic dancer acting like a missing boy and apparently tricking his distraught father (Lindon), went to her as she was wrapping things up on Raw, her cannibal-themed 2016 Critics’ Week hit.
“I was in post-production with Raw,” she recalled, “and when I spend so much time with a film, I, personally, need to think of other stories, because otherwise, I go crazy. And I was reflecting on Raw and I was a bit frustrated with the fact that I didn’t tackle the topic of love as directly as I wanted to at that moment. So I wanted to put love at the center of my next film, that’s one thing that I knew.”
After that, she said, “it’s really a patchwork of thoughts. There was really nothing super-clear like, ‘Oh yeah, I got it, I got my film.’ Not at all. [For example] I thought about a nightmare that was recurring. I don’t have it anymore, but that I used to have, of me giving birth to car engine pieces. It was incredibly distressing, but I always thought, ‘That’s a nice image. I like that.’ But at the same time, I’d be shaking like crazy!”
