Roxane Mesquida @ Roxy Cinema!

On the occasion of the New York release of Her Will Be Done (2026), this four-film series celebrates the remarkable career of French actress Roxane Mesquida, whose fearless performances have taken her from the provocative cinema of Catherine Breillat to the exuberant queer universe of Gregg Araki — and now to Julia Kowalski’s atmospheric new feature.

The series brings together Her Will Be Done (2026) with two essential collaborations between Mesquida and Breillat: Fat Girl (2001), an uncompromising coming-of-age film about two sisters confronting sexuality, desire, and gendered power dynamics; and Sex Is Comedy (2002), a provocative, darkly comic look at the making of an intimate sex scene, loosely inspired by Breillat’s own experiences directing Fat Girl. Together, the films offer a glimpse of Mesquida’s early work and Breillat’s radical approach to sexuality, performance, and the relationship between director and actor.

The program also features Gregg Araki’s Kaboom (2011), a wild and colorful collision of eroticism, science fiction, mystery, and queer coming-of-age, with Mesquida as a seductive figure caught in a college student’s increasingly bizarre fantasies. Mesquida also appears in Araki’s latest film, I Want Your Sex (2026), which ran at Roxy earlier this season.

At the center of the series is Her Will Be Done (2026), Julia Kowalski’s new feature, in which Mesquida plays Sandra, a woman whose fate becomes entangled with a young woman, in whom an ancestral curse awakens inside her whenever she experiences feelings of desire.

Mesquida will join us from France to introduce several of the screenings and, together with Kowalski, participate in Q&As for Her Will Be Done (2026)!

 

More info + tickets at the links below:

Fat Girl — Catherine Breillat, 2001, 86 min.
Twelve-year-old Anaïs is fat. Her sister, fifteen-year-old Elena, is a beauty. While the girls are on vacation with their parents, Anaïs tags along as Elena explores the dreary seaside town. Elena meets Fernando, an Italian law student; he seduces her with promises of love, and the ever watchful Anaïs bears witness to the corruption of her sister’s innocence. 

Sex Is Comedy — Catherine Breillat, 2002, 95 min.
Once again exploring her signature obsessions, Breillat uses this metafictional format to investigate the ethical responsibilities of the artist, the messy logistics of running a set, and the slippery nature of realism, as applied to one of filmmaking’s most challenging ordeals: the simulated sex scene.

Kaboom — Gregg Araki, 2011, 86 min.
A wild, witty and sex-drenched horror-comedy thriller, KABOOM tells the story of Smith (Thomas Dekker), an ambisexual 18-year-old college freshman who stumbles upon a monstrous conspiracy in a seemingly idyllic Southern California seaside town.

Her Will Be Done — Julia Kowalski, 2026, 95 min.
Nawojka, a young woman struggling with her monstrous desire, is convinced that she is struck by a strange hereditary curse and will try to escape the family shackles through Sandra, her sultry neighbor who has returned to the village.