There’d been much anticipation and curiosity about this first feature film by Alexe Poukine, who’d turned heads with her documentaries That Which Does Not Kill [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Alexe Poukine
ficha de la película] and Who Cares? [+lee también:
crítica
entrevista: Alexe Poukine
ficha de la película] , both of which took bold approaches to exploring the acts of listening and talking, as well as trauma and how we accept it and/or move past it, themes which resurface in Kika [+lee también:
crítica
tráiler
entrevista: Alexe Poukine
ficha de la película], presented in the 78th Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week sidebar.

Cineuropa: How did this project come about?
Alexe Poukine: I started to write this film when I was pregnant with my second child. I had this irrational fear that his father would die, at a time when it was really tricky for me, financially. I’d sold my cameras, my coffee machine… The only monetizable thing I had left was my body! And I started to wonder whether I could still sell sexual favours at my age and, if so, which ones? I very quickly realised that the only thing I’d be willing to do was domination, S&M. Luckily for me, I got funding for a documentary, and I didn’t have to resort to that [laughs]. In fact, I have a male friend who’s a both dominant and a social worker. I found it really interesting to think about all those people who need help, the ones liaising with social workers and the ones looking for relationships involving domination, and how those providing that help are under incredible pressure. How suffering and the means to relieve that suffering can take us in strange directions.

Social workers and domination relationships are both about listening. What people want is to be recognised as human beings.
Yes, in all their complexity. It’s something I’d already explored, intensely, in Who Cares?: what do we do with other people’s suffering? What do we do with our own suffering? What do we do when the two of these are interconnected? Kika is grieving. I feel like we’re not allowed to be sad in our society. I find I’m angry quite often, because it’s something which gets me moving, whereas sadness stops us. Kika is someone who can’t stop, because if she stops she’ll fall apart.

The film starts out like a romcom, and we’d like to see where it goes, but it’s stopped in its tracks and it turns into a tragedy. But there’s always humour too.
In (real) life, you can think you’re in a romantic comedy but then suddenly find yourself in a social drama, and you didn’t see it coming. You have to come to terms with reality. When the police tell Kika that David is dead, she’s floored. The philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle calls it “the event”, this thing that transforms your life. I thought it was important to show that in a film context, which is often constrained by genre. In life, we laugh and we cry simultaneously, we find ourselves in different films at the same time. The other thing that motivated me was the feeling I get that, in social dramas, people are often defined by their poverty and nothing else. But poor people and middle-class people both feel love, they’re both funny. Politically speaking, I think it’s problematic that social films are purely dramas. I wanted to do something different. 

The film has its own way of resisting the traditional portrait format. Even though Kika’s central to it all, the camera and story continually linger on the people around her.
It’s true that many of the film’s sequences end on secondary characters. All those people around her carry on living. Kika is at the heart of that ensemble cast, because all the people around her know something about her which sometimes she herself doesn’t even know. I’m interested in showing what other people might think of her situation, especially since Kika doesn’t necessarily want to hear the truth. I wanted to depict loving and generous people. In screenplay manuals, they rave about conflict: it’s the key to success. But I don’t think that’s a very fair view of the world, it implies that “brother will turn on brother”. As a documentary-maker, most of the people I meet are good people. And I wanted Kika to be surrounded by good people. I like that the hasty judgements we might make are proved wrong by the people in question.