Alexe Poukine’s spicy Belgian Cannes hit combines dark wit and sensitivity for the human condition in all its variations, in its story of a mother’s initiation into a taboo marketplace.
Poukine steeps the film in social realism… The filmmaker also embraces her documentary roots in an approach that feels like a beginners guide to BDSM.
Kika 2025
Kika (Manon Clavel) is a married social worker whose stable life is upended when she falls in love with another man and becomes pregnant – and again when her new partner unexpectedly dies. This sets the scene for her journey in search of a new independence, as she navigates impermanence, grief and economic precarity, and seeks out a more lucrative and dependable means of supporting herself and her child.
After chance exposure to an unfamiliar world, she dabbles in sex work for clients with particular kinks. She must contend with her own naive assumptions, and her false hope of easy money, as she shifts from desperation toward labour on her own terms.
In her feature debut, which won over audiences at Cannes, Alexe Poukine does not play this awkward ingenue’s story for sensationalistic titillation. Instead, with wry, irreverent humour and a keen humanistic eye, she explores the harsh realities of financial and emotional survival for women in an era of neo-liberal severity, and the limitations of the traditional ideals of the nine-to-five job and the nuclear family. — Carmen Gray