The film Julian, directed by Belgian filmmaker Cato Kusters, arrives in cinemas on 25 March as a delicate portrait of love, commitment and sudden loss. Based on the public account by Fleur Pierets, the movie follows two creative women who set out to celebrate their union across borders in a project framed as both symbolic and practical. Kusters’ first feature uses a tight, careful style to present an intimate true story without resorting to melodrama, and the result is a film that sits equally between personal memory and public testimony.
The couple and their mission
Fleur Pierets and Julian P. Boom are depicted as complementary forces: Fleur, a writer and art critic, and Julian, a marine cartographer and performance artist, channel their creativity into a shared cause. After marrying in New York in 2017, they conceived what they called the project 22 — a plan to exchange rings in the twenty-two countries that then recognized same-sex marriage. Framed as an act of love and as a visible, civic gesture, the tour combined ceremony, documentation and advocacy. The couple recorded their steps and conversations, hoping their personal story might have a public echo and contribute to broader conversations about rights and belonging.
From celebration to rupture
During the fourth ceremony, held in Paris, the trajectory of the journey changed abruptly. Julian nearly fainted on the Hôtel de Ville forecourt; medical checks then uncovered multiple tumors situated around her brain and heart. The film charts how the couple’s itinerary, planned as a sustained act of witness, was halted by a rapid decline in health that culminated in Julian’s death in January 2018. Kusters handles these events by interweaving joyous footage of weddings with the acute present grief of Fleur, showing how a project conceived as an act of solidarity became also a form of memorial practice.
Adapting the story: form and perspective
Kusters discovered the material after hearing Fleur speak on the radio and then turned to Pierets’ 2026 account as a source for her script. The director opts for a non-linear narrative, alternating between rehearsal-like planning sequences and moments of aftermath, which lets the viewer experience both the momentum of the voyage and the weight of its interruption. Presented in competition at the Festival du Film de Société in Royan, the film resists tidy chronology in favor of emotional clarity: each jump in time functions as a small recalibration of memory and responsibility.
Visual restraint and emotional range
Kusters’ approach is deliberately restrained, relying on precise framing and the textures of day-to-day gestures to convey intimacy. The camera lingers on small, decisive actions — a hand adjusting a ring, a camera being set up for a wedding shot — and thus builds a vocabulary of care. This restraint prevents sentimentality while amplifying the range of feelings at play: passion, indignation, tenderness and the blunt ache of loss. Throughout, the film treats the couple’s activism as inseparable from their private life, making public and private affect one another.
Performances and craft
On screen, Nina Meurisse as Fleur and Laurence Roothooft as Julian form a charged cinematic partnership. Their chemistry reads as lived-in, a product of rehearsal and careful observation: gestures were copied from archival footage and interviews so that small physical habits carry authentic emotional weight. Meurisse has described entering the role through the love at the story’s center, while Roothooft contributed detailed knowledge from longer engagement with the real events. Together they render grief as both personal solitude and ongoing dialogue with memory, making the film feel almost documentary at moments while preserving the craft of fiction.
Intimacy and representation
The way intimate scenes are staged reveals a clear directorial intention: to represent desire between women without exoticizing it. Camera positions and choreography emphasize reciprocity and mutual care, deploying genuine gestures rather than stock images. That decision reinforces the film’s broader aim to present a relationship as complex, political and ordinary all at once, and to honor the two protagonists’ agency even after the project’s abrupt end.
Why Julian matters
Beyond a portrait of mourning, Julian functions as an act of preservation and as a political artifact. Fleur Pierets’ insistence on telling the story — first in writing, then through the film — exemplifies a refusal to let a life and a civic gesture vanish from collective memory. Kusters herself has said she does not expect the film to instantly change legislation where rights are contested, but she believes it can shift perception one viewer at a time. In an era marked by renewed hostilities toward LGBTQ+ rights in multiple places, this film joins other lesbian narratives that resist erasure simply by existing.
As a whole, the film is an epic romantic journey trimmed of sentimentality: it offers affection, anger, tenderness and the practical labour of keeping a memory alive. For audiences seeking a work that blends activism with intimate storytelling, Julian is a compelling example of how cinema can make private vows feel like public commitments and how art can carry the burden of remembrance.