Domestic Animals Selected for Festival Toi Femmes, Paris
- Alex Mendez Giner
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
Sandy Siquier and I are thrilled to share that Domestic Animals is an Official Selection at Festival Toi Femmes, Paris — the first major international festival devoted to women's cinema in the French capital — taking place this June 2026, selected in the festival's "Short Film About Violence" category.
Festival Toi Femmes grew out of a decade of "Toi Femmes" events into a festival in its own right — a Parisian platform projecting the world of women in all their diversity, dreams, and realities. That this film was chosen for the category dedicated to films about violence feels exactly right; Domestic Animals was made for precisely this kind of room, where cinema and social conscience are not separate pursuits but the same act.
The screenings unfold at the Cinéma Mac-Mahon, just off the Arc de Triomphe. Opened in 1938, it holds a real place in film history — the theater whose director defied the Nazi occupation by screening banned American films. For a film built on allegory, image, and visual storytelling, screening in a house with that kind of history means a great deal to us.
Domestic Animals, co-directed with the extraordinary Sandy Siquier, confronts domestic and family violence as both a social wound and a public health crisis. To be selected in a category that names violence directly, at a festival built by and for women's voices, means this film finds one of its most fitting audiences.
We are deeply grateful to festival directors Micheline Abergel and Natasha Mashkevitch and to their selection committee for opening this door. Special thanks to Ignacio García-Bustelo for his exceptional performance, to the talented student crew from Syracuse University's Department of Film and Media Arts, to Javier Weyler for scoring the film's heartbeat, and to Leo Zuloaga for grading its visual atmosphere. Every new screening room is a new conversation. To have this one is a privilege we will not forget.
Domestic Animals continues its international festival journey. À Paris.
