Unspooling within the 78th Cannes Film Festival, Critics’ Week has hosted the world premiere of Kika [+lee también:
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entrevista: Alexe Poukine
ficha de la película], the first fiction feature film by Alexe Poukine who turned heads with her medium-length film Palma - which won an award in Clermont-Ferrand - as well as with her documentaries That Which Does Not Kill [+lee también:
crítica
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entrevista: Alexe Poukine
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entrevista: Alexe Poukine
ficha de la película], each of which took a different approach to questioning the role of listening and talking in trauma management. Kika continues her reflection on vulnerability, painting a singular portrait with collective resonance of a young woman who loves and suffers in equal measure, weighed down by material life, but who ends up finding answers to questions she’d never dared ask along the way.

The film begins like a romcom, a random case of love at first sight, an incandescent encounter of a kind which changes lives. Kika (Manon Clavel) and David (Makita Samba) love one another, even if it’s not always easy to conduct an extra-marital affair, for which you need the means and the right organisational skills. But we still want to see where it all leads and how their devastating attraction turns into a relationship. Except it’s cut down in its prime. Kika finds her trajectory brutally diverted. She ends up grieving, pregnant and in debt, wondering what to do with all the food left over from the funeral reception, like a cloud of smoke masking the brutal nature of the sorrow assailing her. Up against a wall, Kika decides to take a somewhat unorthodox path. Having once been a social worker, committed to helping relieve people’s material struggles, she realises she can get paid… for making people suffer. So, bit by bit, Kika keeps on moving forward, come what may, and oversees other people’s pain in order to better accept her own. Because maybe, at the end of the day, life is about balancing on a tightrope of pain: the pain we suffer and the pain we inflict, whether consciously or otherwise.

Talking and listening were central to Alexe Poukine’s filmmaking approach in her documentaries, and in this work we see that same back and forth, that ebb and flow of feelings, from the transmitter to the receiver, until everything blends together. Whether in her official job or her new occupation, Kika is the one who receives, and sometimes excessively so. What do we do with other people’s pain? What do we do when it ends up awakening our own? The director explores such existential questions with triviality and depth in equal measure, incorporating them into a day-to-day life where reality doesn’t yield to fiction, where the story is anchored and located within real life. The film’s mise en scène gently resists the portrait format, advancing in fits and starts, and occasionally indulging in dizzying ellipses. If Kika is at the centre of it all, she’s at the centre of a human constellation where all perspectives are rich and sensitively showcased. They each also hold some kind of truth, about life but also about Kika herself. At the heart of this nuclear reactor, Manon Clavel delivers a vibrant performance, her agility allowing for this radical blend of genres where comedy constantly vies with drama, as if to remind us that, in life, we laugh and we cry, sometimes simultaneously.

Kika was produced by Wrong Men in Belgium in co-production with Kidam in France. World sales are managed by Totem Films.