“Julie Keeps Quiet”, interview with director Leonardo Van Dijl

“Through the character of my short film Stephanie, which was a gymnist, I began to understand how the world is educating girls, how they treat girls and approach even psychology. (When I chose to focus on a girl who wants to excel at her sport), people asked: why?. Well, she wants to be a good gymnist, she’s a perfectionnist. No, but really, why?. There is no reason. Maybe you should write a suppressive mother who is forcing her, or maybe it’s a story about jealousy, where she wants to be like that other girl she looks up to. But she just wants to be good at what she does, like I want to be a good director. I really find that so bizarre.”

“When there’s immense pressure on you, on so many levels, you need to keep up, you need to stay focused, you go into survival mode. It’s not a healthy space to be in, so for me it was important to, little by little, get her out of this survival mode and bring her back to the centre, where she allows herself to be what she wants to be.”

On the beautiful cinematography, the framing, the lighting: “To begin with, we shot on film, which was kind of a risk and everybody called us crazy, because we didn’t have much budget, so to put that budget into shooting on celluloid was kind of a battle, but me and the DoP Nicolas Karakatsanis felt it was important, because we felt we could not take the silence of Julie for granted. It was like everything should be a deliberate choice, it should be there for a reason. It should only be there if we need it, so we tried to edit it, already on the set. We really worked with the light: in the beginning, there is winter, and then the sun starts shining and things start melting, and Julie is finding her agency again. For the framing, it thought: this movie should be incredibly beautiful, but I tried to hide the beauty, in a way… because it can also create distance, if things are beautiful just for the sake of being beautiful, so I really tried to care, and to be generous for Julie, because she needs it, so I tried to surround her with secret codes, which were a way of saying: Julie, I love you.”