Alice Douard gives the effort of starting a family warmth and room for complicated feelings. We rate her confidence in actors, especially Ella Rumpf, more highly than a writing style that sometimes insists on feelings they have already made clear.
Fi1m perspective
In Love Letters (2025), Ella Rumpf makes Céline’s wish to become a parent feel ordinary and complicated at once. Alice Douard gives the difficulties of adoption their weight without treating that wish as something that needs defending. We were moved by Rumpf’s performance because she makes the effort involved in pursuing parenthood as clear as the desire itself. This is a good debut feature, though its writer-director sometimes overstates what her actors have made plain.
The early work includes the mid-length Extrasystole (2013) and the short Due West (2019), which explores femininity and identity. By Expecting (2022), also a short, she is looking at non-gestational motherhood. Love Letters carries that concern into her first feature, keeping the emotional work of becoming a parent close to the practical difficulties of being recognised as one.
Monia Chokri plays Nadia, and Douard gives the couple’s wish for a child uncertainty before adoption adds its own demands. The writing is most persuasive when those difficulties complicate Céline’s feelings, rather than simply give her another obstacle to overcome. Douard’s preparation with actors and attention to small gestures suit this material. The warmth comes from taking their uncertainty seriously rather than making parenthood look simple.
The controlled photography of Love Letters is part of its appeal. Douard, whose collaborators include cinematographer Jacques Girault, takes care over domestic scenes rather than defaulting to strict naturalism. That visual restraint makes the screenplay’s extra emphasis more noticeable. Once Rumpf has made an emotion clear, Douard sometimes pushes it again in the writing, and we become impatient.
There is enough warmth and confidence here to make the bluntness frustrating rather than fatal. We would start with Love Letters for Rumpf and for Douard’s attention to the emotional effort of parenthood. Next time, she could afford to trust that we have understood before the screenplay checks.
Biography
Alice Douard is a French director and screenwriter. Born in 1985 in Bordeaux, she studied art history before joining the directing department at La Fémis. Her graduation film, Extrasystole (2013), was acquired by Arte and screened at festivals including Clermont-Ferrand.
She has directed several short films, including Les Filles (2015), Plein Ouest (2019) and L’Attente (2022), the last of which won the César Award for Best Short Film. In 2022 she co-founded Les Films de June with Marie Boitard. Douard has also worked as a script supervisor on short and feature films.
Her feature debut, Love Letters (2025, also known as Des preuves d’amour), which she wrote and directed, premiered in the Critics’ Week section of the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Caméra d’Or and Queer Palm. She is credited as script supervisor on Two People Exchanging Saliva (2025).
