Young Flemish director Cato Kusters made her name with her graduate film, Finn’s Heel, which earned her multiple prizes in festivals. For her fiction feature film debut, she embarked upon an adaptation of Fleur Pierets’ book, Julian [+lee también:
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entrevista: Cato Kusters
ficha de la película], in league with screenwriter Angelo Tijssens (who notably co-wrote Lukas Dhont’s movies). The film was screened in a world premiere in Toronto’s Discovery section.

Cineuropa: How did you come across this story?
Cato Kusters: I heard an interview with Fleur Pierets on the radio when her book came out. She’s an incredible orator, and her story was so powerful I had to pull my car over; I was in tears. I bought the book, which I read in one sitting, and I met Fleur the very same day. She was already in discussions with The Reunion [editor’s note: the film’s producer] for its adaptation. They were looking for a filmmaker and had just seen my short film. But I’d only just finished my film studies, I didn’t think I could be a potential option for them. That might be why I ended up in this position, because my early conversations with Fleur were sincere, I didn’t have any ulterior motives.

The film’s narrative is complex but fluid; it travels through time.
The timeline is similar in the book. The reason jumping through time works so well, in my opinion, is that it places the most beautiful moments side by side with the hardest moments. They lend each other colour. Exhilarating moments are full of emotion and the most painful moments are full of love. Angelo and I had to find the most poignant way possible of telling this story, without it rushing off in all directions.

It also says something about the non-linear nature of memory.
When someone close to us dies, we feel responsible for telling their story correctly and doing them justice. Memory is such a fragile thing, Fleur was genuinely scared of forgetting, that’s why she started writing so quickly and let us turn it into a film. It’s also a way of working together to create the most complete image possible of Julian. That’s also why we came up with the idea of a hard disk containing pictures of Julian, which Fleur clings onto as if her life depended on it. It’s a way of reifying that feeling, of preserving Julian’s image at all costs. That hard disk is a metaphor for the brain, for our memory which can be damaged.

The couple also appear in video camera footage.
As we were writing, these scenes shot on a camcorder ended up taking up more and more space. It’s something that Fleur and Julian actually did in real life: they wanted to document their relationship. It’s a way for us to see their intimacy up-close. It allowed us to "give back" the film’s mise-en-scène to the actresses. Some of the camcorder scenes are scripted, but for others we gave them free rein. I didn’t know what to expect, and I have to say, every time I watched this footage once I was back home, when I hadn’t been with them when they’d filmed it, it was like a little gift. I felt like I was seeing these actresses actually falling in love, which was really helpful in the editing phase. What I like about the quality of this footage, which is less sharp, is that it reiterates the fact that we’re observing memories, and that these memories can be incomplete, defective. They’re not necessarily objective. The film becomes a kind of collage of scenes, and that’s also how the brain works. We wanted the texture of the film to be like the texture of memory and memories.

How did you come across your actresses, Nina Meurisse and Laurence Roothooft?
We needed to find a duo to tell this story, whose dynamic was like Fleur and Julian’s in real life. We found Laurence Roothooft really quickly; she’d read the book and wrote a letter to the screenwriter, Angelo Tijssens, to say that if he ever wrote this story, she wanted to and could be Julian! After that, we auditioned lots of other actresses, but when she met Nina, they just clicked.