From its opening moments, it would be nearly impossible to predict the direction Kika (Belgium and France, 2025) ultimately takes. The first fiction feature from French filmmaker Alexe Poukine, which competed in Critics’ Week at Cannes, now screens as part of the Festival do Rio selection.
This is a film that, under its director’s steady hand, begins with a romantic spirit before pivoting toward social realism that approaches the motivations and expressions of sex work without shame or judgment. It’s the kind of production that, in less sensitive hands, would lean more toward sensationalism than the empathy that hides even where we least expect it.
What’s It About?
One day while taking her daughter’s bike for repairs, social worker Kika (Manon Clavel) gets locked inside the shop with the owner, David (Makita Samba). Though both are married, they feel an immediate attraction they decide to explore despite the consequences. They eventually divorce their spouses, marry each other, and plan to start a new family when she becomes pregnant.
However, their future together is abruptly cut short when David dies suddenly. Trapped between her partner’s death, her pregnancy, and the responsibility of supporting her daughter, she’s unable to confront her grief. Drowning in debt, she soon faces an unexpected possibility: having been a social worker dedicated to alleviating others’ suffering, she can now make money by making others suffer as a dominatrix.
Kika first asks: Who helps the helpers?
The reason Kika works despite its seemingly abrupt shifts in direction is because Poukine establishes a solid foundation in social realism that generates sympathy for the characters and their situations. The director carefully shows us not only the frustrating bureaucracy of social assistance work, but also how precarious it can be for the workers themselves, who struggle to make ends meet on their salaries.
Skillfully, the director initially presents the situation as a fragile yet sustainable ideal: Kika can get by while married, though her initial affair could have costly consequences. Her romance with David is treated by the editing as a whirlwind: the montage condenses what could be months into a handful of scenes, and there’s even relief when things work out. Until they don’t.
The early sequences of the film also suggest the protagonist’s moral code and psychology—a woman prepared to go the distance for those requiring social assistance. But she herself tries to carry the weight of the world when she loses her husband, finding an unexpected path toward self-compassion.
Kika approaches BDSM with empathy
After hearing an idea at work, the protagonist timidly immerses herself in the world of sex work. What begins as a means of survival becomes her entry down the rabbit hole into the world of BDSM. Her clients demand everything from seemingly “simple” practices like verbal humiliation to spanking, scatological practices, and infantilizing fetishes.
These situations appear contradictory for someone whose principles include compassion, kindness, and dignity, but Poukine and her co-writer Thomas Van Zuylen find both humor and truth in these clashes. Without ever being excessively explicit, the director manages to confront us with these encounters using empathy and curiosity to break through barriers of discomfort and prejudice.
Kika discovers, as do we watching from the other side of the screen, that there are as many fetishes as there are souls seeking pleasure, liberation, or respite—far beyond the fortune-cookie phrases about life and suffering that certain characters in the story espouse. “It’s less stressful being a dominatrix than a social worker,” she says at one point. Perhaps because some people need to hit themselves first in order to break and, in doing so, rebuild themselves.
Kika will be released soon and is currently part of the official selection at the Festival do Rio.
