Interview with Alexe Poukine, Kika director

After That Which Does Not Kill (2019), her first feature documentary, Alexe Poukine ventures into fiction with Kika, a gut-punch drama about the economic and emotional hardship of a social worker (and single mother), as she struggles to recover after a devastating event.

Interview with Alexe Poukine

I’ve wanted to direct fiction ever since I saw Pretty Woman on the big screen at the age of eight. But coming from a background far removed from cinema and art in general, I took a somewhat winding road to outrun my sense of illegitimacy. For me, Kika is something of a follow-up to Palma. In this first narrative short film, I revisited a period of my life when I lived alone with my daughter, struggling financially. At that time, four months behind on my rent, I started looking for ways to make money fast. One option - which was absolutely out of the question at the time - crossed my mind: the only commodity I still owned was my body. But could I really sell sexual services? Which ones? And how does someone become a sex worker? Since my second documentary was funded, I never had to answer these questions concretely. To some extent, Kika is the woman I imagine I would have been had I not become a filmmaker. 

For me, Kika is a deeply kind woman who is always running in overdrive. She uses irony as a defense mechanism, she is somewhat removed from what she experiences, as if she could only face life from an angle. To some extent, Kika is always performing - she controls her emotions and her environment. I spent almost two years looking for the actress who would play Kika. Famous and nonprofessional actresses auditioned in France and Belgium. Given Kika’s peculiar journey, she needed to be endearing enough for audience members to keep relating to her, even when she embarked on a road less traveled. When casting director Youna De Peretti suggested that I meet Manon, I had imagined an older, less beautiful woman. But as soon as I saw her audition, it was obvious she was the one. I believe there’s deep trust between Manon and me. She is an incredibly generous and extremely precise actress, with a lot of suggestions.

Not having trained in fiction, and having only ever worked on my own films, on this first narrative feature I learnt by trial and error. As a documentarian, my job is to find the most relevant point of view to observe reality. It took time for me to find a more proactive attitude towards what already exists, to be less respectful of reality, to understand that, in fiction, reality is sometimes less believable and less powerful than what is made up.