JULIEN
HARDY-CARDINAL

From an early age, Julien became very passionate about cinema. During his high school years, he watched as many films as he could from all countries and time periods. He then decided to pursue his desire to make his own films when he applied to the Film and New Media program at Champlain College, an english-speaking pre-university school. Having two engineers as parents, this leap towards art as a career felt quite ambitious for him.

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Quickly, Julien started to write and direct individual as well as collaborative film projects which allowed him to be chosen to direct one of the two final productions of his cohort. At his graduation, Julien was awarded the Media Certificate of Merit of his program.

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His journey continued when he was admitted into the very-hard-to-get-into film production program at University of Quebec in Montreal. After two years of working on different solo and team projects, Julien wrote a screenplay which he submitted to the Graduation Films Jury - a group of renowned members of the film industry who had to choose three projects among the ten submitted. Julien’s script was then selected to be produced during the final year of his Baccalaureate.

 

A year later, that film became Our Footprints, the first professionally-made project that the young filmmaker had the chance to make.

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After graduating from university, Julien knew that the only thing he could do that would make him happy and perhaps a little less scared of the grown-ups' world was to make another film. A few months before that, he already had started working on a screenplay, so he finished it and presented the project to producers Romane Lamoureux-Brochu and Philippe Gendron-Comeau, who had just founded their production company, Creuse Encore Productions.

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Romane and Philippe went on to produce the film, which became Her Home, the first non-academic film of the emerging director. Made independently with a self-financed shoestring budget, Her Home was a real challenge for Julien and his producers, but one they enjoyed quite a bit for the resourcefulness it required from them.

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His next project is titled Submarine, and, through a powerful mother-daughter story, delves into the reality of sobriety for people suffering from alcoholism. Being sober for more than 4 years now, it is Julien's most personal film to date. The film stars Debbie Lynch-White, Sophie Bourgeois, Alexie Haddad-Cliche, Evelyne Laferrière and Diane Langlois. Produced by Sara-Maude Catellier through Les productions 1/1 première, the project was shot in July 2023. Distributed by Vital Distribution, it will begin its festival run in Fall 2024.

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As a filmmaker, Julien’s profound desire and goal is to explore the complexities of human relationships - to understand more about ourselves - and to express what he finds through cinematic language.