By Hanna Rantala

LONDON (Reuters) -French filmmaker Julia Ducournau channelled her own emotions and collective trauma for her new drama “Alpha”.

Best known for her Palme d’Or-winning body horror movie “Titane”, Ducournau wove her latest feature around an unruly teenager and a world plagued by a virus which turns patients’ bodies into marble.

Drunk at a house party, 13-year-old Alpha (Melissa Boros) gets a tattoo from a potentially dirty needle, triggering panic from her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) that she may have caught the unnamed virus and leading to her being shunned at school.

Ducournau, who wrote and directed the movie, said the story stemmed from what she felt was a “dark cycle” in present world events and memories of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s. The film is not a

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