Titane – Transgressing Family Ties (Screening & Discussion)

A female figure lays across the hood of a Cadillac which has flames painted on the hood. Several onlookers appear in the background.

TITANE: A metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys, often used in medical prostheses due to its pronounced biocompatibility.

Teetering between visceral body-horror and a heartwarming chosen family drama, Julia Ducournau’s sophomore film, Titane, delivers a genre-bending tightrope act that challenges audiences to contemplate family ties, our desires, and ourselves. Titane twists, perverts and challenges our understandings of male lineage, human reproduction, homosocial environments, and the effects of trauma on the self, the body, and our familial structures. As metal, steroids, and muscle cars set the stage for gender performance, Titane steers us towards a new type of chosen family – not bound by blood or water, but by motor oil and radical acceptance.

Join us to close out the French Film Festival with a screening of Titane, followed by a panel discussion delving into topics of family, body horror, and trans narratives on screen and featuring:

  •  V Serafini (they/he) is queer horror scholar who completed their PhD in the Department of Performing & Media Arts and currently serves as Programming Coordinator for Cornell's Gender Equity Resource Center.
     
  • Teagan Bradway (she/her) is Professor of English at SUNY Cortland and a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University for 2025-26.
     
  • Claire Menard (she/her) is Senior Lecturer of French Language in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell and Faculty-in-Residence for Mews Hall and Loving House.
     
  • Moderator: Tina Coyne (she/they) is the Assistant Director of the LGBT Resource Center and the founder of Queer Aesthetics, a radical arts journal prompting discourse around queer art production and analysis.

This screening will kick off our first installment of Transgressing, an initiative in collaboration with The LGBT Resource Center and The Gender Equity Resource Center highlighting films that challenge gendered and sexual norms.

Our annual French Film Festival is supported by Albertine Cinémathèque and presented in collaboration with the Department of Romance Studies.

Albertine Cinémathèque is part of the French For All initiative by Villa Albertine – The French Institute for Culture and Education, and Albertine Foundation, and is made possible with the support from the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée (CNC).

Transgressing is a collaboration between The LGBT Resource Center, The Gender Equity Resource Center, and Cornell Cinema.

In French with English subtitles. Courtesy of NEON.

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