cinematography
Victor Zébo
editing
Grégoire Pontécaille
music
Rémi Boubal
sound
Gaël Eléon
Alexandre Hecker
Simon Apostolou
production design
Armelle Rabaté

cast
Sonia Bonny (Joy)
Volodymyr Zhdanov (Andriy)
Raphaël Thiéry (Père Léonard)
Asia Argento (Mater)

produttori producers
Saïd Hamich Benlarbi
produzione production
Barney Production

In a dull, desolate town, Joy is an orphan who lives her faith with intensity and almost never leaves her church. Until the day she meets Andriy, a young man who gets beaten up in front of her. Soon, she becomes convinced their paths were meant to cross.

2024 Selon Joy
2021 Time’s Up (short)
2018 La persistente (short)
2014 Karama, Karama (short)

“I’ve been obsessed with the theme of grace for a long time. In The Book of Joy, I wanted to immerse the audience alongside a young woman who lives her faith with intensity, within a world on the verge of collapsing. A solitary heroine, driven by a quest for purity, who ventures beyond the reassuring limits of her church to meet and relate to other people for the first time, even if she takes the risk of losing herself. I wished to reuse the codes of the film noir genre to tell the story of a unique love affair, one both mystical and sensual, which would translate on screen through bodies rather language. Working with the actors Sonia Bonny and Volodymyr Zhdanov drove me to push the film’s physical dimension even further. From the point of view of image and sound, the use of night shots, the industrial landscape, and Le Havre’s concrete architecture have enabled me to explore an underworld on the margins of society, characterized by a powerful, gloomy atmosphere and inhabited by characters struggling to survive.” (Camille Lugan)

A former student of philosophy, Camille Lugan graduated with a degree in screenwriting at La Fémis. She’s co-written several feature films (Ibrahim by Samir Guesmi, Amore Mio by Guillaume Gouix) as well as TV shows (Maroni, season 2, for ARTE) and directed three short films, including La Persistente, which premiered at Critics’ Week in Cannes in 2018. She has just directed her first feature film, The Book of Joy.