08/09/2025 - Cato Kusters’ first feature film offers up a pointillist story of love and poignant grief, advancing at the hurried pace of her protagonist’s memories

Nina Meurisse and Laurence Roothooft in Julian

By way of her first feature film, Julian [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which was unveiled in a world premiere within the Toronto Film Festival’s Discovery section, young Flemish director Cato Kusters delivers a sensitive and fast-paced portrait of love - the love between Fleur (Nina Meurisse) and Julian (Laurence Roothooft) who are crazy about one another, to the point they decide to get married, at home in Belgium, as well as in all the other countries around the world which allow same-sex marriage. There are 22 of these countries (at the time the story unfolds; there are 36 now, out of close to 200), so they contemplate some sort of world tour of love, a voyage which is as much a declaration of love as a declaration of war against the injustice some homosexual couples wishing to marry still face. They leap into action, sell some of their belongings, get their annual leave signed off, and leave their comfortable lives for the greatest of uncertainties. The two women commit to one another and to a struggle which is both bigger than they are and difficult to lead, continually putting them at risk of losing sight of what’s important. But Fleur and Julian are halted in their tracks when the latter starts to feel dizzy just after their Parisian ceremony. The verdict is delivered: Julian is sick and only has a few months left to live. Julian and Fleur find themselves in a limbo, until the latter is faced with Julian’s unbearable absence and sets about keeping her memory alive in whatever way she can.

The film’s story is anything but linear. Julian is an adaptation of Fleur Pierets’ memoirs, in which she tells her and Julian’s stories in a similarly patchwork-memory fashion. The film looks to recreate the labyrinth of human memory, where every path opens up onto another memory and where the story advances more through associations of ideas than through successions of causes and effects. Fleur and Julian’s love is a militant love, they’re convinced of its capacity to change the world. But the film doesn’t focus so much on the two women’s political struggle (a struggle interrupted by illness but continued in the present day thanks to Fleur’s memorial work) as on love as a driving force which endures beyond death. The film’s patchwork temporal form is enhanced by the juxtaposition of different kinds of images - some biographical and some intradiegetic, shot by the protagonists themselves and sharing intimate moments of their life together – and these many textures and temporal convolutions all help to convey an evolving memory. Two wholly committed actresses were required to carry this larger-than-life love story, and this is defintely the case for Nina Meurisse (whom the filmmaker noticed in The Rapture [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iris Kaltenbäck
film profile] and who won a César for Souleymane’s Story [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Boris Lojkine
film profile]) and Laurence Roothooft (a Flemish actress seen on stage and on TV to date).

Julian was produced by The Reunion (Belgium), a production company founded by brothers Michiel and Lukas Dhont (the latter the director of Girl [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lukas Dhont
film profile] and Close [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Eden Dambrine
interview: Lukas Dhont
interview: Lukas Dhont
film profile]), and co-produced by another pair of famous brothers, the Dardennes, via their firm Les Films du Fleuve (Belgium), with which producer Delphine Tomson is involved, alongside Topkapi Films (Netherlands). World sales are entrusted to The Match Factory.

(Translated from French)